Energy : What is a crystal?. Alternatif Energy

(I'm bringing this up because I want to write about "time crystals", and to do that....)

A crystal is a larger whole comprising a spatially periodic arrangement of identical building blocks.   The set of points that delineates the locations of those building blocks is called the lattice, and the minimal building block is called a basis.  In something like table salt, the lattice is cubic, and the basis is a sodium ion and a chloride ion.  This much you can find in a few seconds on wikipedia.  You can also have molecular crystals, where the building blocks are individual covalently bonded molecules, and the molecules are bound to each other via van der Waals forces.   Recently there has been a ton of excitement about graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, and other van der Waals layered materials, where a 3d crystal is built up out of 2d covalently bonded crystals stacked periodically in the vertical direction.

The key physics points:   When placed together under the right conditions, the building blocks of a crystal spontaneously join together and assemble into the crystal structure.  While space has the same properties in every location ("invariance under continuous translation") and in every orientation ("invariance under continuous orientation"), the crystal environment doesn't.  Instead, the crystal has discrete translational symmetry (each lattice site is equivalent), and other discrete symmetries (e.g., mirror symmetry about some planes, or discrete rotational symmetries around some axes).   This kind of spontaneous symmetry breaking is so general that it happens in all kinds of systems, like plastic balls floating on reservoirs.  The spatial periodicity has all kinds of consequences, like band structure and phonon dispersion relations (how lattice vibration frequencies depend on vibration wavelengths and directions).