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A liquid crystal phase is thermotropic if its order parameter is determined by temperature. At high temperatures, liquid crystals become an isotropic liquid and at low temperatures, they tend to glassify. In a thermotropic crystal, those phase transitions occur only at temperature extremes; the phase is insensitive to concentration.
Crystallography ranges from the fundamentals of crystal structure to the mathematics of crystal geometry, including those that are not periodic or quasicrystals. At the atomic scale it can involve the use of X-ray diffraction to produce experimental data that the tools of X-ray crystallography can convert into detailed positions of atoms, and ...
A crystal's crystallographic forms are sets of possible faces of the crystal that are related by one of the symmetries of the crystal. For example, crystals of galena often take the shape of cubes, and the six faces of the cube belong to a crystallographic form that displays one of the symmetries of the isometric crystal system. Galena also ...
An example of the cubic crystals typical of the rock-salt structure [broken anchor]. Time-lapse of growth of a citric acid crystal. The video covers an area of 2.0 by 1.5 mm and was captured over 7.2 min. The interface between a crystal and its vapor can be molecularly sharp at temperatures well below the melting point.
Crystallization is the process by which solids form, where the atoms or molecules are highly organized into a structure known as a crystal.Some ways by which crystals form are precipitating from a solution, freezing, or more rarely deposition directly from a gas.
Stacking faults occur in a number of crystal structures, but the common example is in close-packed structures. They are formed by a local deviation of the stacking sequence of layers in a crystal. An example would be the ABABCABAB stacking sequence. A twin boundary is a defect that introduces a plane of mirror symmetry in the ordering of a crystal.
A colloidal crystal is an ordered array of colloidal particles and fine grained materials analogous to a standard crystal whose repeating subunits are atoms or molecules. [1] A natural example of this phenomenon can be found in the gem opal, where spheres of silica assume a close-packed locally periodic structure under moderate compression.
In mineralogy, crystal habit is the characteristic external shape of an individual crystal or aggregate of crystals. The habit of a crystal is dependent on its crystallographic form and growth conditions, which generally creates irregularities due to limited space in the crystallizing medium (commonly in rocks ).