Fundamental domains for rhombic lattices with dihedral symmetry of order 8 (Q2001986): Difference between revisions

A lattice \(\Gamma\) in \(\mathbb{R}^2\) is a subgroup of \(\left(\mathbb{R}^2,+\right)\) generated by two linearly independent vectors. A fundamental domain \(F\) of \(\Gamma\) is a compact set \(F \subseteq \mathbb{R}^2\) such that \(\{p+v:p \in F,v\in\Gamma\}=\mathbb{R}^2\) and \(\mathrm{int}(F+v_1) \cap \mathrm{int}(F+v_2)= \emptyset\) whenever \(v_1,v_2 \in \Gamma\), \(v_1 \ne v_2\). The symmetry group of \(F\) contains all Euclidean isometries mapping \(F\) onto \(F\). The point group of \(\Gamma\) consists of all isometries that map \(\Gamma\) onto \(\Gamma\) and have the origin \((0,0)\) as a fixed point. The authors consider rhombic lattices, generated by two vectors of the same length such that the angle between them is not in \(\left\{\frac{\pi}{3},\frac{\pi}{2},\frac{2\pi}{3}\right\}\), and construct corresponding fundamental domains whose symmetry group is isomorphic to the dihedral group \(D_4\). This way they show that every lattice in \(\mathbb{R}^2\) has a fundamental domain whose symmetry group is strictly larger than the lattice's point group, as all the other cases have been fixed before in another paper of the same authors [``Highly symmetric fundamental domains for lattices in \(\mathbb{R}^2\) and \(\mathbb{R}^3\)'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1305.1798}].