Crystallography: Symmetry groups and group representations

Abstract

This lecture is aimed at giving a sufficient background on crystallography, as a reminder to ease the reading of the forthcoming chapters. It more precisely recalls the crystallographic restrictions on the space isometries, enumerates the point groups and the crystal lattices consistent with these, examines the structure of the space group, which gathers all the spatial invariances of a crystal, and describes a few dual notions. It next attempts to familiarize us with the representation analysis of physical states and excitations of crystals.