New Tricks of the Trade for Crystal Structure Refinement

Accurate crystal structures and their experimental uncertainties, determined by X-ray diffraction/neutron diffraction techniques, are vital for crystal engineering studies, such as polymorph stability and crystal morphology calculations. Because of differences in crystal growth and data measurement conditions, crystallographic databases often contain multiple entries of varying quality of the same compound. The choice of the most reliable and best quality crystal structure from many very similar structures remains an unresolved problem, especially for nonexperts. In addition, while crystallographers can make use of some professional software (i.e., Materials Studio) for structure refinement, noncrystallographers may not have access to it. In the present paper, we propose a simple method to study the sensitivity of the crystal lattice energy to changes in the structural parameters, which creates a diagnostic tool to test the quality of crystal structure files and to improve the low-quality structures based on lattice energy distribution. Thus, noncrystallographers could take the proposed idea and program/optimize crystal structure by themselves. They can have their in-house program to determine the reliability of the selected crystal data and then use the best quality data or carry out structural optimization for low-quality data. The proposed method will benefit a broad cross-section of scientific researchers, especially those in solid-state and physical chemistry.