In crystallography, a glide plane is a symmetry operation describing how a reflection in a plane, followed by a translation parallel with that plane, may leave the crystal unchanged.
Glide planes are noted by a, b or c, depending on which axis the glide is along. There is also the n glide, which is a glide along the half of a diagonal of a face, and the d glide, which is along a fourth of either a face or space diagonal of the unit cell. The latter is often called the diamond glide plane as it features in the diamond structure.
Read more about Glide Plane: Formal Treatment
Famous quotes containing the words glide and/or plane:
“Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We’ve got to figure these things a little bit different than most people. Y’know, there’s something about going out in a plane that beats any other way.... A guy that washes out at the controls of his own ship, well, he goes down doing the thing that he loved the best. It seems to me that that’s a very special way to die.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)