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🔷 Crystal Lattice Defects: Vacancies, Interstitials and Dislocations

Interactive 3D crystal lattice where you toggle vacancy, interstitial and edge-dislocation defects and watch the surrounding atoms displace and strain according to real elasticity fields.

Chemistry & Materials3DModerate60 FPS

An interactive 3D cubic crystal lattice: switch between a vacancy, an interstitial atom and an edge dislocation, and watch neighbouring atoms shift from their ideal sites under real elastic displacement fields.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Point defects (vacancy, interstitial) distort the lattice with an isotropic 1/r² field; the edge dislocation uses the classical elasticity displacement equations built from the Burgers vector and Poisson's ratio. Atom colour encodes local strain.

🎮 How to Use

Pick a defect type, resize the lattice block, and raise the thermal vibration slider to jiggle atoms like heating the crystal. Toggle the strain color map to compare raw geometry against the displacement heat-map. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom.

💡 Did You Know?

Dislocations let metals deform plastically by gliding one atomic row at a time — far cheaper energetically than shearing a whole crystal plane, which is why real metals are ductile instead of brittle.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D crystal lattice where users toggle vacancy, interstitial and dislocation defects and drag atoms to see how the lattice distorts and strain propagates around each defect type.

crystal-defectsvacanciesdislocationslattice-structurematerials-sciencecrystallography

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install