Pages

Hexagonal confusion

Most hexagonal unit cells, despite being called "hexagonal" will be depicted as this shape:


But you can reproduce the hexagon just by repeating it four times:


Below is a different type of unit cell representing hexagonal close packing:


It is important to remember that these two representations don't need to paired together, they both separately describe the same structure. This is visible by repeating the second unit cell further:

The circled atoms are higher up

No comments:

Post a Comment