Safety Emporium for all your lab and safety needs
Safety Emporium for all your lab and safety needs

Structure World

The Cesium Chloride Structure

Divider

General Notes

CsCl has a cubic unit cell. At first glance you might think that it is body-centered, but this would be true only if the atom at the body center was the same kind of atom as those on the corners of the cells. This is clearly not the case.

CsCl can be thought of as two interpenetrating simple cubic arrays where the corner of one cell sits at the body center of the other. As with NaCl, the 1:1 stoichiometry means that the cell will look the same regardless of whether we start with anions or cations on the corner. Note that each ion is 8-coordinate rather than 6-coordinate as in NaCl.

Structural Information

CsCl Vital Statistics
Formula CsCl
Crystal System Cubic
Lattice Type Primitive
Space Group Pm3m, No. 221
Cell Parameters a = 4.123 Å, Z=1
Atomic Positions Cl: 0, 0, 0   Cs: 0.5, 0.5, 0.5
(can interchange if desired)
Density 3.99
Melting Point 646 degrees C
Alternate Names none
Isostructural
Compounds
NH4X, TlX (X = halide), CuZn (beta-brass),
AgZn, LiHg, MgSr

Structure

a structure a structure
Fig. 1 A single unit cell of CsCl Fig. 2 A 3x3x3 lattice of CsCl

Chime models

Here are two Chime models you can rotate and manipulate (Chime is obsolete. I need to update these to jmol; just haven't found the time yet). Notice the following important features:

Fig. 5 A single unit cell of CsCl. Fig. 6 A 2x2x2 chunk of CsCl lattice.

Divider

[Structure World Home Page]

This page was last updated Wednesday, January 22, 2020
This document and associated figures are copyright 1996-2024 by Rob Toreki. All rights reserved.