A building block corresponds then to the material content of a cell of this "blurred" space lattice, which is to be considered a paracrystal.
The primary, most accessible source of crystallinity information is X-ray diffraction and cryo-electron microscopy,[6] although other techniques may be needed to observe the complex structure of paracrystalline materials, such as fluctuation electron microscopy[7] in combination with density of states modeling[8] of electronic and vibrational states.
Scanning transmission electron microscopy can provide real-space and reciprocal space characterization of paracrystallinity in nanoscale material, such as quantum dot solids.
Numerical differences in analyses of diffraction experiments on the basis of either of these two theories of paracrystallinity can often be neglected.
It has also been successfully applied to synthetic polymers, liquid crystals, biopolymers, quantum dot solids, and biomembranes.