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The lecture introduces crystals, defining them as solids with atoms arranged in a periodic fashion, and highlights the importance of crystal structures in determining material properties. It covers different types of solids, including crystalline, amorphous, and polycrystalline, and explains concepts like unit cells and lattice points. The session concludes with a summary of basic crystal structures and common semiconductor materials.

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5 views2 pages

Script

The lecture introduces crystals, defining them as solids with atoms arranged in a periodic fashion, and highlights the importance of crystal structures in determining material properties. It covers different types of solids, including crystalline, amorphous, and polycrystalline, and explains concepts like unit cells and lattice points. The session concludes with a summary of basic crystal structures and common semiconductor materials.

Uploaded by

趙翊閔
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Hi everyone, today I will give an introduction of crystals.

Before we start, can anyone tell me what kind of materials can be described as crystals?

After today’s lecture, you will understand what crystals are and learn some basic crystal
structures.

First of all, the definition of crystals is that atoms are arranged in a periodic fashion. For
structures that are crystals, they appear exactly the same at different periodic points.
Let’s have a pattern that represent the arrangement of atoms in a material. Since they are
periodic, it is a crystal.

After we learned the definition of crystals, then we might want to know the motivation of
learning it. Because materials structure determines their properties, such as mechanical
strength and electrical conductivity, it is important to learn the structure of materials. Crystal is
one of the most important atomic arrangements in solid. Here I show three types of solid
classified according to atomic arrangement. The first one is crystalline, because its atoms are
arranged periodically. The second one is called amorphous, because its atoms are arranged
randomly. The third one is kinda in between. It is periodic in each different portion but overall it
doesn’t have a single direction of the arrangement.

Under the definition of crystal, we can say that metals are a kind a crystal for example iron.
Ceramics are also a crystal for example salt. It composed of potassium and chlorine ions in a
periodical way. Even polymers can be a crystal. Polymer is a long chain molecule. Once the
chain folded together and formed a periodic structure like here, it can be called crystal. For
example, Nylon is a kind of crystalline polymer.

Lets have an exercise after we learned how to defined a crystal from their atomic arrangement.
It is a cross-sectional image of a MOS transistor, a kind of an electronic device, that shows the
arrangement of its atoms Can anyone tell me which part of the image is crystalline?
Part a is crystalline because its atoms are arranged periodically. Part b is polycrystalline because
its atoms are periodic in some portion and random in the other portion. Between them is
amorphous because we can’t see any periodic arrangement in this part.

If we want to define a crystal structure, we must learn the concept of unit cell and lattice point.
For any crystal structure, we only need to know what the unit cell and lattice points looks like,
then we can reconstruct the whole crystal structure. An unit cell is defined as the smallest
repeated unit with full crystal structure symmetry and a lattice point is defined as points that
have the same environment in the same orientation and are indistinguishable from each other.
Lets look at our simple cartoon that represent a crystal first. For this example, unit cell is this
square area because if we copy this square pattern and paste it next to it, we can reconstruct
the whole crystal pattern. And lattice points will become this four black circles, because at each
point, the red face is surrounded by three red face in the same orientation.
Here are some basic crystal structures. First is the simple cubic structure. It has one lattice point
on each corner in its unit cell and there is only one atom sitting in each lattice point. The total
atoms in a unit cell are 1 because there are one eighth of atoms sitting at 8 corners. The other
structure is called body centered cubic because compared to simple cubic, it has an additional
atom sitting in the center of the unit cell. Therefore, the total atoms in this unit cell is 2.

Lets have an exercise on calculating the number of atoms in one unit cell. This is a crystal
structure called faced center cubic. Compared to the simple cubic, it has one additional atoms
sitting on each faces. Can anyone tell me how many atoms are in this unit cell or just type your
answer in the chat box.
The answer is 4 because it has 1/8 of atom sitting at 8 corners and ½ of atom sitting at 6 faces.

What if we have more than one atom sitting in one lattice point?
For example, the face centered cubic, if we put two atoms in each lattice point, it will become
the structure like this.

It is a very important structure because most common semiconductor materials have this kind
of structure. They are silicon and GaAs. If the two atoms in each lattice point are the same, it
called diamond structure. If the the two atoms in each lattice point are different, it called Zinc
Blende structure.

That is the end of the lecture and let me summarize what we learned today. First, we learn that
crystal is a kind of solid material arrangement that their atoms are arranged in a periodic
fashion. 2nd, we learned how to define a crystal with unit cell and lattice point. 3 rd we learn
some basic crystal structure and lastly, some common semiconductor materials that has the
structure which we learned today.

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