Crystals twin boundaries

Twins are commonly found or formed in all types of crystals. Their boundaries are of two general types coherent and incoherent. The coherent boundaries are usually also symmetric, so they offer little resistance to dislocation motion. However, the incoherent ones are not symmetric and may resist dislocation motion considerably. 

Twins are intergrown crystals such that the crystallographic directions in one part are related to those in another part by reflection, rotation, or inversion through a center of symmetry across a twin boundary. Twinned crystals are often prized mineralogical specimens. When twins are in contact across a well-defined plane (which is not always so), the boundary is generally called the composition plane. The only twins that are considered here will be reflection twins, where the two related parts of the crystal are mirror images (Fig. 3.22). The mirror plane that relates the two components is called the twin plane. This is frequently, but not always, identical to the plane along which the two mirror-related parts of the crystal join, that is, the composition plane. Repeated parallel composition planes make up a polysynthetic twin (Fig. 3.23). 

Twin boundaries are frequently encountered in cuprate superconductors. There are a number of ways in which twins might form in a crystal, one of which is... 

Single crystal and bulk BaTiOs exhibits a sharp paraelectric-to-ferroelectric transition at 393K. In the presence of submicron grains, the transition becomes diffuse and can be absent for polycrystalline BaTiOs. Twin boundaries along the four crystallographically equivalent 11 planes constitute the main lattice defects. Junctions between such twin boundaries can be frequently observed within a grain. The local atomic arrangement of the core of twin intersections was studied by focal-series reconstruction (Jia etal. 1999). 

Figure 12.9. Spiral step pattern observed on both sides of a twin boundary on a 0001 face of a hematite crystal [7]. T.B. is the twin boundary, J. and T indicate orientations. Phase contrast photomicrograph.

All real crystals have atoms which occupy external surface sites and which do not possess the correct number of nearest neighbors as a consequence, Thus, a surface is a scat of energy and is characterized by surface tension. Furthermore, internal surfaces exist, grain boundaries and twin boundaries across which atoms are incorrectly positioned. In a crystal of reasonable size—say 1 cubic centimeter, these two-dimensional defects, called surface defects, contain only about 1 atom in 106, a rather small fraction. Even so, surfaces are important attributes of solids. 

Another contribution to variations of intrinsic activity is the different number of defects and amount of disorder in the metallic Cu phase. This disorder can manifest itself in the form of lattice strain detectable, for example, by line profile analysis of X-ray diffraction (XRD) peaks [73], 63Cu nuclear magnetic resonance lines [74], or as an increased disorder parameter (Debye-Waller factor) derived from extended X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy [75], Strained copper has been shown theoretically [76] and experimentally [77] to have different adsorptive properties compared to unstrained surfaces. Strain (i.e. local variation in the lattice parameter) is known to shift the center of the d-band and alter the interactions of metal surface and absorbate [78]. The origin of strain and defects in Cu/ZnO is probably related to the crystallization of kinetically trapped nonideal Cu in close interfacial contact to the oxide during catalyst activation at mild conditions. A correlation of the concentration of planar defects in the Cu particles with the catalytic activity in methanol synthesis was observed in a series of industrial Cu/Zn0/Al203 catalysts by Kasatkin et al. [57]. Planar defects like stacking faults and twin boundaries can also be observed by HRTEM and are marked with arrows in Figure 5.3.8C [58],... 

Like a grain boundary, the twin boundary is a higher energy state, relative to the crystal. However, because a twin boundary is highly ordered, it is of lower energy than... 

A second type of boundary, in which there is no misorientation between grains, is the antiphase boundary. This occurs when wrong atoms are next to each other on the boundary plane. For example, with hexagonal close-packed (HCP) crystals, the sequence. .. ABABAB... can be reversed at the boundary to ABABA ABABA, where represents the boundary plane. Antiphase boundaries and stacking faults are typically of very low energy, comparable to that of a coherent twin boundary. 

In a crystal containing twin defects, the crystal lattices continue across the twin boundaries without a break. Another similar defect, the antiphase defect, is formed by a shift of the crystal by half a unit cell along the antiphase boundary. This defect can also contribute to strong image contrast as shown in Figure 10.3b. 

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