Cubic (crystal system)
In crystallography, the cubic (or isometric) crystal system is a crystal system where the unit cell is in the shape of a cube. This is one of the most common and simplest shapes found in crystals and minerals.
There are three main varieties of these crystals:
Each is subdivided into other variants listed below. Note that although the unit cell in these crystals is conventionally taken to be a cube, the primitive unit cell often is not. This is related to the fact that in most cubic crystal systems, there is more than one atom per cubic unit cell.
A classic isometric crystal has square or pentagonal faces.
The three Bravais lattices in the cubic crystal system are:
The primitive cubic system (cP) consists of one lattice point on each corner of the cube. Each atom at a lattice point is then shared equally between eight adjacent cubes, and the unit cell therefore contains in total one atom ( 1⁄8 × 8).
The body-centered cubic system (cI) has one lattice point in the center of the unit cell in addition to the eight corner points. It has a net total of 2 lattice points per unit cell ( 1⁄8 × 8 + 1).
The face-centered cubic system (cF) has lattice points on the faces of the cube, that each gives exactly one half contribution, in addition to the corner lattice points, giving a total of 4 lattice points per unit cell ( 1⁄8 × 8 from the corners plus 1⁄2 × 6 from the faces). Each sphere in a cF lattice has coordination number 12.
The face-centered cubic system is closely related to the hexagonal close packed (HCP) system, and the two systems differ only in the relative placements of their hexagonal layers. The [111] plane of a face-centered cubic system is a hexagonal grid.
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