The Fascination of Crystals and Symmetry
Rubies, sugar, snowflakes: crystals are beauty, arranged in grid structures. This MOOC explains the basic building blocks of crystals, their symmetrical structure and introduces free software for crystal structure exploring.
- FREE
- English
- Chemistry
- with certificate upgrade option
What is the course about?
Course Summary
In this course, we will provide you with a basic introduction into crystallography. The focus is placed upon the symmetry elements, which occur in crystals. The arrangement of the atoms inside the crystal needs a more detailed description than the overall shape of the crystal (morphology). We want to show you how symmetry is classified in a hierarchical way. We want our students to gain the ability to discover symmetry on their own.
What will I learn?
At the end of the course you will be aware of the similarities between the patterns on wallpaper and the structures of crystals, be able to classify the innumerable appearances of crystals into the seven different crystal systems, know how to find crystallographic data and how to analyze it regarding symmetry, you will understand the International Tables for Crystallography and will be familiar with software for analyzing and drawing crystals structures.
What do I have to know?
Basic knowledge in chemistry (atoms, simple molecules).
Course Structure
| Chapter | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 1 | Introduction to Crystals and Crystal Systems |
| Chapter 2 | Crystal Systems, Fractional Coordinates, and Morphology of Crystals |
| Chapter 3 | The World of Symmetry, Crystal classes and Plane groups |
| Chapter 4 | Glide planes, Screw axes and Space groups |
| Chapter 5 | Quasicrystals and Real Crystal Structures (in 3D) |
| Chapter 6 | Metal-Organic Frameworks and Networks |
| Chapter 7 | Practising Topology Determination, Tilings |
Workload
Approx. 4 hours per week.
Course instructors
Selected Course Reviews
Overall Rating 5.0 (2 students)
Leant a lot of materials
This is a very good course for introduction to crystals systems, lattices, classes, symmetry and point groups. It introduces you to several interesting software packages all of which run on windows. I use a MAC at the moment so I could not use one of them ( TOPOS). All the videos in this course are already available (Frank Hoffmann) on YouTube. The YouTube channel allows viewers to directly write to Frank and he responds to questions accordingly.