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It can be used to define the rhombohedral lattice system, a honeycomb with rhombohedral cells. A rhombohedron has two opposite apices at which all face angles are equal; a prolate rhombohedron has this common angle acute, and an oblate rhombohedron has an obtuse angle at these vertices.
However, the rhombohedral axes are often shown (for the rhombohedral lattice) in textbooks because this cell reveals the 3 m symmetry of the crystal lattice. The rhombohedral unit cell for the hexagonal Bravais lattice is the D-centered [1] cell, consisting of two additional lattice points which occupy one body diagonal of the unit cell with ...
Of the 32 point groups that exist in three dimensions, most are assigned to only one lattice system, in which case the crystal system and lattice system both have the same name. However, five point groups are assigned to two lattice systems, rhombohedral and hexagonal, because both lattice systems exhibit threefold rotational symmetry.
Crystals can be classified in three ways: lattice systems, crystal systems and crystal families. The various classifications are often confused: in particular the trigonal crystal system is often confused with the rhombohedral lattice system, and the term "crystal system" is sometimes used to mean "lattice system" or "crystal family".
With hexagonal and rhombohedral lattice systems, it is possible to use the Bravais–Miller system, which uses four indices (h k i ℓ) that obey the constraint h + k + i = 0. Here h, k and ℓ are identical to the corresponding Miller indices, and i is a redundant index.
Regarding the number of atoms in the unit cell, structures in the rhombohedral lattice system have a rhombohedral primitive cell and have trigonal point symmetry but are also often also described in terms of an equivalent but nonprimitive hexagonal unit cell with three times the volume and three times the number of atoms.
The degree of translation is then added as a subscript showing how far along the axis the translation is, as a portion of the parallel lattice vector. For example, 2 1 is a 180° (twofold) rotation followed by a translation of 1 / 2 of the lattice vector. 3 1 is a 120° (threefold) rotation followed by a translation of 1 / 3 of ...
Confusion also arises in the rhombohedral lattice, which is alternatively described in a centred hexagonal (a = b, c, α = β = 90°, γ = 120°) or primitive rhombohedral (a = b = c, α = β = γ) setting. The more commonly used hexagonal setting has 3 translationally equivalent points per unit cell.