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Published in:
2009 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Thinking in Reciprocal Space
Authors : David B. Williams, C. Barry Carter
Published in: Transmission Electron Microscopy
Publisher: Springer US
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In the previous chapter, you’ve already encountered vectors
k
and
g
and seen that they have lengths with units of nm
−1
. These vectors are referred to as reciprocal-lattice vectors. Now we are going to discuss what this reciprocal lattice is. The reciprocal lattice is simply a lattice in reciprocal space. Note that this lattice is just as real as the ‘real lattice’ in ‘real’ space. It’s like a new world in
Gulliver’s Travels
but the relationship to ‘our’ world is not a linear scaling factor but a reciprocal one. If something (an object or a length) is large in real space, then it’s small in reciprocal space.