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The RDF method, being an isotropic average of a two-body data set, tells us very little quantitatively about the sample—the average nearest neighbor distance, the average coordination number, and the mean density—and it determines these values precisely.

A number called the isoperimetric quotient, which roughly captures a particle's shape based solely on its volume and surface area, and a measure called coordination number, which describes how many close neighbors a particle has, predicted 94 percent of the time which of the crystalline forms a polyhedron would take.

Type, the coordination type; Number, the coordination number; R, interatomic distance; and σ2, the measure of the static disorder of the shell.