Fig. 1: Schematic depiction of hierarchical disorder within the crystal.
From: A method for intuitively extracting macromolecular dynamics from structural disorder
The three columns show: (left) possible states of the crystal for different scales of disorder; (middle) the average of these states; and (right) the combination of disorder at this level with the disorder from previous rows. Different possible contributions of disorder lead to systematic contributions across a the whole unit cell, b whole molecules or domains and c local elements. Where the disorder terms are uncorrelated, the observed disorder (c, right) is simply the sum of these different sources.
