CBSE Class 12-science Answered

In crystallography, the tetragonal crystal system is one of the 7 lattice point groups. Tetragonal crystal lattices result from stretching a cubic lattice along one of its lattice vectors, so that the cube becomes a rectangular prism with a square base (a by a) and height (c, which is different from a).

There are two tetragonal crystal structure types. Bravais lattices: the simple tetragonal (from stretching the simple-cubic lattice) and the centered tetragonal (from stretching either the face-centered or the body-centered cubic lattice). One might suppose stretching face-centered cubic would result in face-centered tetragonal, but face-centered tetragonal is equivalent to body-centered tetragonal, BCT (with a smaller lattice spacing). BCT is considered more fundamental, so that is the standard terminology.