Crystallography & Nuclear/Material Physics

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Abstractions about the physical structure of matter at atomic and nuclear scales, including crystal lattices and space groups, nuclear decay modes, diffraction techniques, and material phenomena like glass formation and pyroelectricity.

13 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Colloidal crystal — An ordered periodic or locally periodic array of colloidal particles whose lattice-scale spacing produces crystal-like mechanics, phase behavior and often optical diffraction.
• Double electron capture — A rare nuclear-decay mode in which two bound electrons are captured by two protons, converting them into neutrons while atomic number falls by two and mass number is unchanged.
• Fractional coordinates — Crystal coordinates expressing a point as coefficients of the unit-cell lattice basis.
• Glass formation — The kinetic arrest of a liquid or disordered material into an amorphous solid before crystallization can establish long-range order.
• Linear energy transfer — The mean energy an ionizing particle deposits locally per unit path length in matter under a specified restricted or unrestricted convention.
• Mirror nuclei — A pair of isobars whose proton and neutron counts are exchanged, providing a symmetry comparison of nuclear structure.
• Okorokov effect — Resonant coherent excitation of fast ions channeled through a crystal when their internal transition frequency matches the periodic lattice-field frequency in the ion frame.
• Precession electron diffraction — A transmission-electron-microscopy diffraction method that rocks a tilted incident beam around the optic axis and de-rocks the outgoing pattern, integrating intensities over orientations to reduce dynamical artifacts.
• Pyroelectricity — The change in spontaneous electric polarization and resulting surface charge produced by a change in a material’s temperature.
• Rod group — One of the three-dimensional crystallographic line groups describing structures periodic along exactly one spatial direction.
• Secondary emission — The release of additional particles, usually electrons, from a material after energetic primary particles or radiation deposit energy at or near its surface.
• Theory of solar cells — The semiconductor-physics framework explaining how absorbed photons generate, separate and collect charge carriers as electrical power in a photovoltaic device.
• Wyckoff positions — The symmetry-equivalence classes of points in a crystallographic space group, classified by conjugate site-symmetry subgroups and tabulated by multiplicity, letter and coordinate constraints.