Primitive cell

A primitive cell is a unit cell constructed so that it contains only one lattice point (each vertex of the cell sits on a lattice point which is shared with the surrounding cells, each lattice point is said to contribute 1/n to the total number of lattice points in the cell where n is the number of cells sharing the lattice point). A primitive cell is built on the primitive basis of the direct lattice, namely a crystallographic basis of the vector lattice L such that every lattice vector t of L may be obtained as an integral linear combination of the basis vectors, a, b, c.