Optical Crystallography

optical crystallography, branch of crystallography that deals with the optical properties of crystals. It is of considerable interest theoretically and has the greatest practical importance. The science of petrography is largely based on the study of the appearance of thin, transparent sections of rocks in a microscope fitted with polarizers. In the absence of external crystalline form, as with the minerals in a rock, a mineral often may be readily identified by the determination of some of its optical properties.

According to their action on transmitted plane-polarized light, all crystals may be assigned to one or another of the five groups enumerated below, which correspond to the seven systems of crystallization (in the second group, three systems are included together). The several symmetry classes of each system are optically the same, except in rare cases:

1. Optically isotropic crystals (isometric system), which exhibit only one index of refraction for light of each colour;

2. Optically uniaxial crystals (tetragonal, hexagonal, and rhombohedral [or trigonal] systems), which exhibit double refraction and yield two refractive indices for light of each colour, one parallel to the optical axis and one perpendicular to the optical axis;

3. Optically biaxial crystals (all of which exhibit three principal refractive indices, one along each of the mutually perpendicular optical axes) in which the three optical axes correspond to the three crystallographic axes (orthorhombic system);

4. Optically biaxial crystals in which only one of the three optical axes corresponds to a crystallographic axis (monoclinic system);

5. Optically biaxial crystals with no fixed and definite relation between the optical and crystallographic axes (triclinic system).