The importance of definitions in crystallography

Abstract

This paper was motivated by the articles "Same or different - that is the question" in CrystEngComm (July 2020) and "Change to the definition of a crystal" in the IUCr newsletter (June 2021). Experimental approaches to crystal comparisons require rigorously defined classifications in crystallography and beyond. Since crystal structures are determined in a rigid form, their strongest equivalence in practice is rigid motion, which is a composition of translations and rotations in 3-dimensional space. Conventional representations based on reduced cells and standardizations theoretically distinguish all periodic crystals. However, all cell-based representations are inherently discontinuous under almost any atomic displacement that can arbitrarily scale up a reduced cell. Hence comparing millions of known structures in materials databases needs continuous distance metrics.