ME 382 / Crystal structures
Rotate cubic, hexagonal close-packed, and diamond-cubic unit cells to explore how crystallographic planes cut through their lattices.
Choose a crystal structure and its plane indices to see a plane intersect the unit cell. Atoms are drawn as touching hard spheres; turn on plane sections to highlight the circular areas cut through them. The diamond-cubic structure is tetrahedrally coordinated, not close-packed.
are fractional coordinates along the cubic axes. Integer labels the lattice-plane family; the applet normally shows the centered representative . The simple-cubic radius plane is placed at to show a corner-atom layer; FCC is placed on a triangular plane through three cell corners.
are fractional coordinates along the hexagonal directions. Integer labels a lattice plane; planes normally use . The HCP radius plane is placed at on the lower basal face. The Cartesian triad is not the same as the hexagonal index directions.
The page reports whether the selected plane contains atom centers from both species. Binary default planes are mixed-species planes, not necessarily the densest or close-packed planes; those can be single-species layers.
Cubic structures use Miller indices (h k l).
Cubic: x ↔ h, y ↔ k, z ↔ l
← All interactive demos · View the source code on GitHub.