Cubic Unit Cells

I'll admit that I posted this video. If you check, it's on the Lonnie Dusch (the actual name of your friendly neighborhood blogger) account.

I didn't make the video. I didn't clip it from whatever its original source it. But I needed it, and I had a downloaded copy that I got somewhere along the way of teaching the material science summer camps.

So I posted it on YouTube so I could stream it from anywhere.

If that's the event that pushes me over the edge into eternal damnation, I really wish I would've known.

But you might as well benefit from me risking my eternal soul.

So, check this video out.

It's a brilliant computer animation showing the main crystal structures that we cover in our material science course - simple cubic, body centered cubic, face centered cubic, and hexagonal close packing. We get the coordination number of each structure, a great animation showing the slicing to find the unit cell, the percent occupied, the 

The animation showing how many total atoms are in the simple cubic unit cell (at 1:35 - and repeated throughout the video for the other crystal structures) is so simple and elegantly shown.

I absolutely show this one in class every year - though I stop at about 5:34 because they start to get into ionic compounds (ceramics) which are beyond where we go with unit cells.

(I do warn you that it looks like the video locks up about 0:15 - 0:45. The audio continue, but the video goes still. Don't freak out. It works fine after that.)