The real honeycomb structure—From the macroscopic down to the atomic scale

Abstract

The honeycomb’s eponymous structure is omnipresent in our every day lives. We want to provide some inspiration to perform structural analyses of these structures and to draw comparisons between them. In the present study, we detect honeycomb patterns and related complex network structures on different length scales ranging from macroscopic objects down to the atomic scale of 2D materials. In 2D materials, a subset of the honeycomb structure—the kagome lattice—is very interesting due to unique material properties. For structure detection, we developed a program written in Python. The program is very adaptable and provides a graphical user interface to modify the detected network interactively. With the help of this program, we directly compare honeycomb structures with atomic network structures. Both honeycombs and 2D atom networks can show local deviations from their characteristic hexagonal pattern. The structural deviations at the macroscopic scale and at the atomic scale are very similar. We provide additional structural analyses of every day objects and encourage everyone to use our software that is freely accessible.