Introduction

Solid state physics is mainly concerned with the study of crystals. Identical blocks or groups of atoms, arranged in a particular pattern, when periodically and indefinitely assembled, are responsible for the crystal structure. The non-primitive crystal axes can also reproduce the crystal but the volume enclosed by these axes may not necessarily be the smallest volume that can be repeated to form the crystal structure. While the number of atoms in a primitive cell or primitive basis can be more than one, it is always the same for a given crystal structure. The Wigner-Seitz method is a very accurate way of obtaining a primitive cell. It is helpful to create MATLAB code to make the conversion from crystal to Cartesian axes tasks easier to perform. The plane’s intercepts with the crystal axes can be used to obtain the Miller indices, commonly written in the notation (h k l).