Customer Reviews

The Basics of Crystallography and Diffraction (International Union of Crystallography Texts on Crystallography)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
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Very nice book, very comprehensive, excellent quality of pictures. Can be recommended as a very gentle introduction to crystallography and diffraction. Probably not so useful for more advanced students.

For an undergrad reader, Hammond develops the theory and explains the experiments you can do in crytallography. The theory of scattering from a single crystal explains the diffraction patterns. The latter are what you observe, and the text shows how you can work back from these to deduce what the underlying crystal structure might be.

There are variations on this approach. Especially the powder method, where you do not have a single crystal, but a powder of microcrystals. Which can be visualised as spinning the Bravais lattice around its origin, to give the diffraction patterns.

More recent observations like quasicrystals are also covered.

A good introduction to crystallography.

I found this book to be a very nice introduction of X-Ray Crystallography. There is just enough detail so that it is not overwhelming, but you can still learn quite a bit from this book.