Introduction to Periodic Geometry and Topology

Abstract: This monograph introduces key concepts and problems in the new research area of Periodic Geometry and Topology for materials applications.Periodic structures such as solid crystalline materials or textiles were previously classified in discrete and coarse ways that depend on manual choices or are unstable under perturbations. Since crystal structures are determined in a rigid form, their finest natural equivalence is defined by rigid motion or isometry, which preserves inter-point distances. Due to atomic vibrations, isometry classes of periodic point sets form a continuous space whose geometry and topology were unknown. The key new problem in Periodic Geometry is to unambiguously parameterize this space of isometry classes by continuous coordinates that allow a complete reconstruction of any crystal. The major part of this manuscript reviews the recently developed isometry invariants to resolve the above problem: (1) density functions computed from higher order Voronoi zones, (2) distance-based invariants that allow ultra-fast visualizations of huge crystal datasets, and (3) the complete invariant isoset (a DNA-type code) with a first continuous metric on all periodic crystals. The main goal of Periodic Topology is to classify textiles up to periodic isotopy, which is a continuous deformation of a thickened plane without a fixed lattice basis. This practical problem substantially differs from past research focused on links in a fixed thickened torus.