Classification of heavy-metal fluorides. fluorides with fluorite-like cation arrangement

The main feature of fluorite structure type is four families of crystallographic planes with dense trigon cation nets which are mutually oriented as the faces of a regular octahedron. A complicated cation composition may cause lowering of general symmetry to tetragonal (only one four-fold axis remains in the octahedral complex), rhombohedral (one three-fold axis), orthorhombic, and monoclinic. The geometric parameters of the cation sublattice remain constant. They are close to the parameters of the ideal face-centered cubic cation sublattice of fluorite (the measure of similarity is 1.00–0.81). This is true for all analyzed fluoride structures and some U⁴⁺, Th⁴⁺, Zr, and Ln oxyfluorides. Thus, the concept is confirmed that the crystalline state is determined by systems of parallel planes filled by dense heavy-atom nets. Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences. Institute of Crystallography, Russian Academy of Sciences. Translated fromZhurnal Struktumoi Khimii, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 71–80, January–February, 1994. Translated by T. Yudanova