Interactive 3D crystal structures and basic solid state chemistry

Click on one of the underlined structures in the left-hand panel to go to the crystal structure pages for that structure. Click on the structures and then you can rotate them. JavaScript must be enabled in your web browser.

Background to the structures

Structures are displayed by JSmol, running on JavaScript. Please allow a few moments for the structure to load. Using the wheel on the mouse you can zoom in and out of the structures. A right-click on the structures will reveal further options.

The unit cell parameters and nuclear coordinates of the crystal structures are based upon output from crystallographic databases. The Cambridge Structural Database is used for organic structures, and the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database, which is copyright by Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe (FIZ) in Germany, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the USA, is used for inorganic structures.

The structures in these pages contain all the necessary information required for a Cambridge Pre-U course in Chemistry. There is also much besides that is intended to be interesting and challenging extension material.

The emphasis in these pages is on cubic structures, since these are the most symmetrical, and so it is through these that ideas of symmetry are most clearly demonstrated. Also cubic structures are the focus of the Pre-U Chemistry course.

Acknowledgements

These pages were originally written from September to December 2006 during a sabbatical term at St Catharine's College, Cambridge and the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge. I am very grateful to Dr Peter Wothers MBE for organising the sabbatical and to Prof. James Keeler for his help and guidance with the creation of the Jmol applets (as they were back then) using data from crystallographic databases.

Information on the minerals was taken from the Mineral Gallery.

Lists of structures conforming to the types described here were taken from A. F. Wells, "Structural Inorganic Chemistry", 5th edition, F. C. Phillips "An Introduction to Crystallography" and the US Naval Research Laboratory's Center for Computational Materials Science (Crystal Lattice Structures).