scope:

The main purpose of this book is to evaluate the crystallographic properties of all of the elements at ambient pressure in order to provide a base line for high pressure studies. The exception is of course helium which cannot be obtained as a solid at ambient pressure and is therefore considered on a temperature-pressure-volume basis. Allotropic modifications are considered for boron, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur and selenium and separate isotopic evaluations are given for hydrogen, helium, lithium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, neon and silicon.

Compilations on the thermodynamic properties of the elements at the U.S. Bureau of Mines were introduced in 1934 (Kelley 1960) but the first comprehensive review on all of the elements appears to be that of Stull and Sinke 1956. However, until the present evaluation there does not appear to have been a similar detailed review on the crystallographic properties of the elements, although various aspects of such a review were contained in three tours de force, on the thermal expansion of the metallic elements by Touloukian et al. 1975, on the non-metallic elements by Touloukian et al. 1977, and on the crystal structures of the elements by Donohue 1974. Not only did Touloukian et al. 1975, 1977 contain extensive bibliographies but they also included a significant amount of data which was originally given only in the form of graphs. They also gave representative equations, graphs and tables of both selected values and original thermal expansion and length change values. Although new data has resulted in many of the equations becoming obsolete there are still several which cannot be improved upon and have been accepted in the present publication with full acknowledgement. Donohue 1974 also included an extensive bibliography and, especially for the room temperature region, included all of the reported lattice parameter measurements available for each element. Values already rejected by Donohue 1974 were not included in the present evaluation. Although published over forty years ago, many of the room temperature lattice parameter values selected by Donohue 1974 are very close to values selected here once wavelength corrections are taken into account. A further very useful service provided in the review of Donohue 1974 was the correct description of axis sequencing for anisotropic structures which eliminated much confusion that had existed in the literature.

Other reviews included tables of thermal expansion for many elements by Kirby at al 1972 but without references. Goldak et al. 1966 reviewed the crystallographic properties of alpha zirconium, and Lloyd and Barrett 1966 reviewed alpha uranium. Wang and Reeber 1998 selected thermal expansion values for the body-centered cubic refractory metals vanadium, niobium, tantalum, molybdenum and tungsten, Reeber and Wang 1996a diamond, Reeber and Wang 1996b silicon and germanium, Wang and Reeber 1996 copper and Wang and Reeber 2000 aluminum. Lu et al. 2005 reviewed the thermal expansion of several metallic elements but appeared ultimately to have relied on the thermal expansion values given by Kirby et al. 1972 and Touloukian et al. 1975, as did Zhang et al. 2013 who carried out an assessment of the thermal expansion coefficients for forty two pure metals using a Debye-Grüneisen model.