A Bravais lattice with three perpendicular conventional axes and lattice points at and . A translation by half a diagonal of an face preserves the complete crystal motif; apparent centering of unlabelled molecular centers alone is insufficient.
A phonon is one quantum of a normal vibrational mode of a crystal. In the harmonic approximation, each mode with wavevector , branch index and angular frequency is an oscillator with energies . A phonon changes the occupation by one; it is not a particular atom moving through the solid.
For a three-dimensional primitive cell containing atoms there are branches. Three acoustic branches approach zero frequency as : at zero wavevector they represent rigid translations, with all basis atoms displaced together. Their small-wavevector frequencies usually grow linearly with wavevector. The remaining optical branches have internal relative motion of basis atoms and generally nonzero zone-centre frequencies. The names reflect their coupling to radiation in suitable polar crystals, not a rule that every optical mode must be infrared active. Acoustic and optical branches can each have longitudinal or transverse polarizations.
For neutron energy loss, . Write . The neutron dispersion , or , gives
A triangle of these wavevectors exists if
With , the requested momentum transfers have . Consequently
For example is too small even for forward scattering at these unequal neutron energies, and exceeds the backscattering maximum. This identifies accessible reciprocal lattice points, not guaranteed nonzero intensity: a one-phonon structure factor contains the atomic scattering lengths, eigenvectors and factors . A transverse eigenvector perpendicular to may be invisible, and basis interference can cause extinctions. The supplied geometry and cell constants do not specify that full intensity selection rule.
The vectors from the B atom to its three nearest N neighbours can be chosen as
Indeed , and . All three have length . Repeating the two-site basis over produces the honeycomb pattern in the first panel of the original figure in solution.
Solving gives
The first Brillouin zone is the Wigner–Seitz hexagon of this reciprocal lattice. Its vertices are and , with independent signs in the latter set. The centre is ; one inequivalent corner is , with . Corners related by a reciprocal lattice translation are equivalent, leaving two inequivalent valleys.
A linear combination of atomic orbitals expands a crystal wavefunction in localized orbitals on all sites,
Here labels the basis site, the retained atomic orbitals and . For the two-band model retain one relevant orbital on each B or N atom, usually the out-of-plane orbital, and neglect other orbital manifolds. Define normalized Bloch sums for cells,
Then . Bloch periodicity puts the same two coefficients in every cell. We adopt the stated orthonormality, neglect longer-range hopping, and approximate the diagonal matrix elements by the supplied atomic energies . More generally the crystal environment shifts these on-site energies, so equality with isolated-atom expectation values is an additional tight-binding approximation.
For equal real nearest-neighbour transfer integral , this phase convention gives
The secular determinant is . Thus
Since , this is the requested algebraic form. A hopping-sign convention or rephasing of the Bloch sums changes off-diagonal phases but not these eigenvalues. Explicitly,
For type I, a magnetic unit cell uses the magnetic Bravais translations , and . They form an FCC lattice with conventional cubic parameter . A two-spin basis is an up spin at and a down spin at , or fractional conventional coordinates and . Every translation preserves the parity of .
At , the FCC translation sum allows all integers or all half-odd-integers. The spin basis contributes , which removes the integer set and leaves
Equivalently the spin field is , so magnetic Bragg peaks are nuclear reciprocal vectors shifted by .
For type II with parallel spins along , use , and as magnetic translations: a primitive tetragonal cell with side lengths , containing an up spin at zero and a down spin at . The reciprocal translations have both integers or both half-odd-integers, with integer. The same basis factor removes the integer- set:
This also follows from . Other domains permute the three coordinate directions. A magnetic neutron cross section further multiplies these lattice conditions by the magnetic form factor and by the component of ordered moment perpendicular to ; that polarization factor can suppress an otherwise allowed peak.
This is a C-centered orthorhombic lattice. The translation takes each A molecule to another A molecule and each B molecule to another B molecule. Thus the conventional cell has two lattice points.
A two-molecule crystal motif can be chosen as A at and B at . Attaching that same motif to both C-centered lattice points produces all four molecules, hence eight iodine atoms per conventional cell.
The centers alone appear face-centered, but exchanges A and B orientations. It is not a translation symmetry of the oriented molecular solid. An F-centered assignment would discard essential motif information.
A Bravais lattice is a set of equivalent points generated by integer combinations of three independent translation vectors. A crystal motif is the arrangement of atoms attached identically to every lattice point. Together they specify the periodic crystal structure: lattice translations repeat the motif without changing its internal arrangement.
A unit cell is a region whose translations tile the structure. A primitive unit cell contains one lattice point after sharing boundary points with neighboring cells. A conventional cell can contain more than one lattice point to display the crystal's symmetry with simple axes and angles; for example, a conventional face-centered cube has four lattice points but a less visually symmetric primitive cell has one.
Rotational symmetry compatible with a periodic three-dimensional lattice has order or , as expressed by the crystallographic restriction theorem. A crystallographic fivefold axis is excluded from an ordinary periodic crystal. This statement concerns exact lattice symmetry; it does not exclude local fivefold atomic arrangements or nonperiodic ordered structures.