Thermal ellipsoids, more formally termed atomic displacement parameters or anisotropic displacement parameters, are
ellipsoids used in
crystallography to indicate the magnitudes and directions of the
thermal vibration
The term "thermal energy" is used loosely in various contexts in physics and engineering. It can refer to several different well-defined physical concepts. These include the internal energy or enthalpy of a body of matter and radiation; heat, d ...
of
atom
Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons.
Every solid, liquid, gas, ...
s in
crystal structure
In crystallography, crystal structure is a description of the ordered arrangement of atoms, ions or molecules in a crystalline material. Ordered structures occur from the intrinsic nature of the constituent particles to form symmetric patterns ...
s. Since the vibrations are usually
anisotropic (different magnitudes in different directions in space), an ellipsoid is a convenient way of visualising the vibration and therefore the symmetry and time averaged position of an atom in a crystal. Their theoretical framework was introduced by
D. W. J. Cruickshank in 1956 and the concept was popularized through the program
ORTEP (Oak Ridge Thermal-Ellipsoid Plot Program), first released in 1965.
Thermal ellipsoids can be defined by a
tensor
In mathematics, a tensor is an algebraic object that describes a multilinear relationship between sets of algebraic objects related to a vector space. Tensors may map between different objects such as vectors, scalars, and even other tensor ...
, a mathematical object which allows the definition of magnitude and orientation of vibration with respect to
three mutually perpendicular axes. The three principal axes of the thermal vibration of an atom are denoted
,
, and
, and the corresponding thermal ellipsoid is based on these axes. The size of the ellipsoid is scaled so that it occupies the space in which there is a particular probability of finding the electron density of the atom. The particular probability is usually 50%.
See also
*
Debye–Waller factor
References
{{Crystallography
Crystallography