Crystal structure in Materials Science

by Prof. Andreas Leineweber (TU Bergakademie Freiberg)

Monday 2 Nov 2026, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Berlin

PH HS 3 (Physics Department)

Most scientists agree that most of the properties of hard-condensed matter can somehow be traced back to the underlying crystal structure. However, especially in materials science it is widely recognised that microstructure plays a similar or even more important role than crystal structure itself, when it comes to specific properties, e.g. mechanical properties beyond simple elastic behaviour.

The speaker presents a personal perspective on the role of crystal structure in his group’s research on metallic and selected non-metallic hard condensed matter systems. This research uses various types of diffraction techniques ranging from X-ray and neutron diffraction on polycrystalline specimens to more localised electron microscopy-based techniques. However, all these techniques are affected by both crystal structure and microstructure of the specimen under investigations.

Hence, evaluation of diffraction measurements requires additional considerations to partition between crystal structure and microstructure. This happens by requiring that the crystal structure should reflect thermodynamic bulk equilibrium. The partitioning is essential to avoid misinterpreting microstructural effects as genuine symmetry lowering and consequently reporting spurious low-symmetry variants of well-established crystal structures. In any case, there is important interplay between crystal structure and corresponding typical microstructures. The examples shown have been selected to highlight aspects sometimes overlooked upon doing “routine” crystal structure analysis.