World’s largest crystal structure in town!

The world’s biggest crystallography model of common salt was unveiled at the ongoing 24th Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) 2017 at HICC on Tuesday.

Professor Gautam R Desiraju, Chairman, LOC IUCr2017 Congress and past President, IUCr, Dr Robert Krickl, Crystallographer along with Sir Thomas L Blundell, University of Cambridge unveiled the model that is on display.

The model (about 25 cubic metre volume, 680kg, 38 880 balls, and 10.5km of connecting sticks) shows the largest section of a crystal's atomic structure ever to be physically modeled true to scale in 3D. It is built by crystallographer Dr Robert Krickl and was displayed at City Hall of Vienna in 2015.

There was a special session on ‘Salt of the Earth’ and the various aspects of this unique compound, sodium chloride, NaCl, common salt, that is so important in crystallography and in Indian History too. This model has made it to the Guinness Book of Records.

Dr Krickl said, “I want to show and visualise how our world looks when it is magnified about a billion times. This discovery had a major impact on science and our understanding of the world. It led to the determination of the structure of DNA, of viruses, of proteins - and on the other hand, of materials used in our daily lives, for technology to build faster, better lighter machine.”