Survey of possible layer stacking structures*

The stacking of layers forming three-dimensional periodic structures is explored in the general case, where neither the layers nor the stacking need to be close-packed, and the connectivity number for the system may be either two or four. Procedures are described whereby all possible stacking variants can be systematically derived for a given number of layers, and for a given number of possible stacking positions. The latter depends on the structure of the layer and on the stacking vector.