Crystallographic Compendium

These notes have been prepared (and revised, re-revised, etc.) over the past decades while working through various problems encountered in our crystallographic analyses. They are not intended as a complete and systematic development of crystallography, but rather they reflect topics or problems of interest to me or that were particularly challenging that I needed to work through to better understand. This effort reflects the “learn-by-doing” approach that I have found to be valuable when I am trying to master new material.

The inspiration for this compendium is Charles Kittel’s Elementary Statistical Physics (Dover, 2004, originally published in 1958) that is organized around 45 sections, each a few pages in length, that cover a set of important topics in this field. By comparison, the present effort makes no attempt (yet) to develop the material in a systematic way, either in the flow of topics, the depth of treatment, or even (alas) using a consistent set of symbols. I hope to be able to correct these defects at some time in the future. At the same time, there are always new topics to incorporate (as I learned from my time in Student Affairs “there is always more to learn”) and the evolution of this collection will undoubtedly reflect the tension between clarifying (and correcting) existing material and tackling new subjects.