Crystallography

Single crystal diffraction is one of the most precise methods to characterize new compounds and to verify their chemical composition and atom arrangement. It furthermore gives insights into the intermolecular interactions. Finding the right conditions to crystallize a substance is not always easy, and predicting the solid-state structure is among the most challenging aspects in chemistry. Nevertheless, it is highly important for the physical and biological properties that derive from the arrangement of atoms, molecules and polymer structures in the solid state. Crystallography, including single crystal and powder diffraction, but also the development of new methods and tools, is therefore an important and fundamental science that supports chemistry, physics, biology and materials science. 

In chemistry, crystal engineering is one of the subareas of crystallography that has emerged over the past 20–30 years and has had a huge impact on the development of new compound classes, such as coordination polymers, including metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs). These materials continue to find so many different applications in, e.g., filtering, batteries, catalysis, gas sorption, etc., that they are often proposed for a future Nobel prize.

The Section "Crystallography" of the journal Chemistry, therefore, invites contributions in all areas of chemical crystallography, but does not exclude overarching contributions from biology, physics and materials science.