Face-centered tetragonal lattice Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
A tetragonal conventional cell with lattice points at its vertices and face centers describes a Bravais lattice. It is equivalent, after a rotation and a change of conventional cell, to a body-centered tetragonal description. The reciprocal lattice of a body-centered tetragonal lattice with conventional sides consists of with even; these points form a face-centered tetragonal conventional cell with sides .
The body-centered tetragonal lattice has points at and in the conventional cell. Add the two-atom motif to each. Reducing coordinates modulo integer translations gives
Thus the cell contains four atoms, not merely the two lattice points. In projection along , label each projected point by its fractional height ; the four sites do not all lie in the same plane.
Figure 1.
Original calculated projection of two-by-two conventional beta-tin cells; colors and labels give fractional height, not different chemical species
. Details.
The plotted repeat is in both horizontal directions. Atoms on the outer drawing boundary are repeated images needed to show neighboring cells, rather than additional unshared atoms in the four-cell counting volume.