Examples for different crystal stuctures

Well, if you are really intrested in these things, then I will show you different examples for crystals :

Here you can see a crystal which contains atoms of a different size.

You will notice :

The atoms which are smaller then the other atoms are placed between the huge atoms.

You might ask yourself if there is a strange thing about it. Well, the answer is, that actually there is no difference between these two pictures :

They both describe the same material !

The only difference is that one time, you have got just the structure of the crystal (if it is regular, symmetry,...), and the other time you also got the size and the certain positions of the single (and different) atoms.

Here you can see again what is meant with structure of the christal.

In this two cases it is not important to see and to know the size of every single atom !

The only important thing here is the geometric structure of the two christals, so that you can see if the structure is just like a triangle or an octaeder.

And beginning from this geometric structure, you can find out the qualities of this certain christal.

Click here to go back to the atoms.

Copyright 1986 : Pictures taken from the book"elemente - Chemie I", Ernst Klett Verlage GmbH & Co. KG, Stuttgart 1986