The terms d-spacing and interlayer spacing are often used interchangeably in layered materials like MXenes, but they have subtle distinctions in their meaning:
Key Difference
In summary, d-spacing includes the thickness of both the layers and the interlayer space, while interlayer spacing refers only to the gap or free space between the layers themselves.
In practical terms, the d-spacing is what’s commonly measured by X-ray diffraction, whereas the interlayer spacing is inferred as part of that value.
Hello Jiaoli Li
To understand what d-spacing really is, one must understand first the basic concepts of general unit cell of crystals. An unit cell is an abstract construction, that represents the whole solid. Also, there are the crystal planes, or lattice planes, that also are abstract planes that "pass" through the cell. Once you have parallel lattice planes, they have a perpendicular distance between them. This distance is called d-spacing. To make it easier, you can imagine a plane passing through the origin of the unit cell, and then the parallels planes can be anywhere in the cell, each of them having a distance d.
So, you can see that this is a "property" common to all crystals, once all crystals have unit cell and lattice planes. Interlayer spacing, however, is a distance between layers of a material. So, there are materials that don't have layers, like diamond, but there are materials that have layers, like graphite. So a distance of two perpendicular layers is, by definition, a interlayer distance, and also is a d-spacing because is a distance between two planes inside a unit cell.
Feel free to reply if you need more details of this explanation.
Best regards,
Ricardo Tadeu
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