Crystals – Calculating Distance Between Adjacent Planes in a Crystal

crystalssemiconductor-physicssolid-state-physicsx-ray-crystallography

This question has been asked before, but there doesn't seem to be a decent answer.

Many sources state that " For cubic crystals with lattice constant a, the spacing d between adjacent (ℓmn) lattice planes is:

$$ {\displaystyle d_{\ell mn}={\frac {a}{\sqrt {\ell ^{2}+m^{2}+n^{2}}}}}$$
"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_structure

Could someone please explain what "adjacent" means in this case (Is it planes that share the same side, is it parallel planes, are these panes in the same unit cell or neighbouring cells etc)? Better yet, does anyone know of a sketch explaining this ?
I am really at a loss here and this has been driving me nuts the whole day

Best Answer

enter image description here

I could only find this poor-quality picture. It should give you an idea, anyway. For example, consider the first picture in the first row: $(l,m,n)=(1,0,0)$ in that case, and it is easy to verify that the distance between the grey planes is

$$d=a$$

In the second case, $(l,m,n)=(1,1,0)$, and you can see that

$$d=\frac a {\sqrt 2}$$

etc.

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