You can\'t remember if copper is FCC or BCC at room temperature. The internet is

Question

You can't remember if copper is FCC or BCC at room temperature. The internet is down, your smart phone's battery is dead, and you left your textbook at home. If I were to give you a cube of pure copper about the size of a die, could you determine the crystal structure of the copper? You have access to the table and data contained within this exam, a ruler, a scale, thermometer, an oven, a cup of water and a rubber chicken If it is possible for you to determine the crystal structure, how would you do it? Specifically, what measurements and calculations would you make? If it is not possible, explain why.

Explanation / Answer

Yes, we could determine the crystal structure of copper when we introduce them to diffraction. We’ll use old-fashioned paper and pencil method. We use ruler.

Measure the 2-theta values of the lowest angle diffraction peaks and list them in a column. For each, calculate [sin (theta)]^2 and then compute the ratios of successive values of [sin(theta)]^2, and list these as the nearest integer. These are labelled N

We would know that the structure is FCC with only the reflections corresponding to hkl all odd or all even present. 111 (N=3), 200 (N=4), 220 (N=8), 311 (N=11), 222 (N=12) etc.

Copper is FCC at room temperature

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