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Seifertite
Seifertite is a silicate mineral with the formula SiO2 and is one of the densest polymorphs of silica. It has only been found in Martian and lunar meteorites, where it is presumably formed from either tridymite or cristobalite – other polymorphs of quartz – as a result of heating during the atmospheric re-entry and impact to the Earth, at an estimated minimal pressure of 35 GPa. It can also be produced in the laboratory by compressing cristobalite in a diamond anvil cell to pressures above 40 GPa. The mineral is named after Friedrich Seifert (born 1941), the founder of the Bayerisches Geoinstitut at University of Bayreuth, Germany, and is officially recognized by the International Mineralogical Association.Seifertite: A new natural very dense post-stishovite polymorph ...
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Friedrich Seifert
Friedrich Alfred Seifert (born 8 May 1941) is a German mineralogist and geophysicist. He is the founding director of Bayerisches Geoinstitut at University of Bayreuth. A silicate mineral, seifertite, is named after him. Life and work Seifert was born in Dresden, Germany in 1941. He studied mineralogy at the University of Kiel and the University of Zurich and received his PhD degree from the University of Zurich in 1966 for his work on the rock metamorphosis at high temperatures and pressures. For his post-doctorate work, Seifert moved to University of Bochum and defended a habilitation thesis in 1970. In 1972, he became professor at the University of Bochum. He then stayed at the Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, DC, where he applied Mössbauer spectroscopy to study the kinetics of the formation of rocks and minerals. After returning to Germany in 1974, he assumed a professor position at the University of Kiel. Seifert changed to the University of Bayreuth in 1986 and ...
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Silica
Silicon dioxide, also known as silica, is an oxide of silicon with the chemical formula , most commonly found in nature as quartz and in various living organisms. In many parts of the world, silica is the major constituent of sand. Silica is one of the most complex and most abundant families of materials, existing as a compound of several minerals and as a synthetic product. Notable examples include fused quartz, fumed silica, silica gel, opal and aerogels. It is used in structural materials, microelectronics (as an electrical insulator), and as components in the food and pharmaceutical industries. Structure In the majority of silicates, the silicon atom shows tetrahedral coordination, with four oxygen atoms surrounding a central Si atomsee 3-D Unit Cell. Thus, SiO2 forms 3-dimensional network solids in which each silicon atom is covalently bonded in a tetrahedral manner to 4 oxygen atoms. In contrast, CO2 is a linear molecule. The starkly different structures of th ...
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Coesite
Coesite is a form ( polymorph) of silicon dioxide Si O2 that is formed when very high pressure (2–3 gigapascals), and moderately high temperature (), are applied to quartz. Coesite was first synthesized by Loring Coes Jr., a chemist at the Norton Company, in 1953.The word "coesite" is pronounced as "Coze-ite" after chemist Loring Coes Jr. Occurrences In 1960, a natural occurrence of coesite was reported by Edward C. T. Chao, in collaboration with Eugene Shoemaker, from Barringer Crater, in Arizona, US, which was evidence that the crater must have been formed by an impact. After this report, the presence of coesite in unmetamorphosed rocks was taken as evidence of a meteorite impact event or of an atomic bomb explosion. It was not expected that coesite would survive in high pressure metamorphic rocks. In metamorphic rocks, coesite was initially described in eclogite xenoliths from the mantle of the Earth that were carried up by ascending magmas; kimberlite is the most c ...
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Silicate Minerals
Silicate minerals are rock-forming minerals made up of silicate groups. They are the largest and most important class of minerals and make up approximately 90 percent of Earth's crust. In mineralogy, silica (silicon dioxide, ) is usually considered a silicate mineral. Silica is found in nature as the mineral quartz, and its polymorphs. On Earth, a wide variety of silicate minerals occur in an even wider range of combinations as a result of the processes that have been forming and re-working the crust for billions of years. These processes include partial melting, crystallization, fractionation, metamorphism, weathering, and diagenesis. Living organisms also contribute to this geologic cycle. For example, a type of plankton known as diatoms construct their exoskeletons ("frustules") from silica extracted from seawater. The frustules of dead diatoms are a major constituent of deep ocean sediment, and of diatomaceous earth. General structure A silicate mineral is genera ...
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Sodium Oxide
Sodium oxide is a chemical compound with the formula Na2 O. It is used in ceramics and glasses. It is a white solid but the compound is rarely encountered. Instead "sodium oxide" is used to describe components of various materials such as glasses and fertilizers which contain oxides that include sodium and other elements. Structure The structure of sodium oxide has been determined by X-ray crystallography. Most alkali metal oxides M2O (M = Li, Na, K, Rb) crystallise in the antifluorite structure. In this motif the positions of the anions and cations are reversed relative to their positions in CaF2, with sodium ions tetrahedrally coordinated to 4 oxide ions and oxide cubically coordinated to 8 sodium ions. Preparation Sodium oxide is produced by the reaction of sodium with sodium hydroxide, sodium peroxide, or sodium nitrite: : 2 NaOH + 2 Na → 2 Na2O + H2 To the extent that NaOH is contaminated with water, correspondingly greater amounts of sodium are employed. Exces ...
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Orthorhombic Minerals
In crystallography, the orthorhombic crystal system is one of the 7 crystal systems. Orthorhombic lattices result from stretching a cubic lattice along two of its orthogonal pairs by two different factors, resulting in a rectangular prism with a rectangular base (''a'' by ''b'') and height (''c''), such that ''a'', ''b'', and ''c'' are distinct. All three bases intersect at 90° angles, so the three lattice vectors remain mutually orthogonal. Bravais lattices There are four orthorhombic Bravais lattices: primitive orthorhombic, base-centered orthorhombic, body-centered orthorhombic, and face-centered orthorhombic. For the base-centered orthorhombic lattice, the primitive cell has the shape of a right rhombic prism;See , row oC, column Primitive, where the cell parameters are given as a1 = a2, α = β = 90° it can be constructed because the two-dimensional centered rectangular base layer can also be described with primitive rhombic axes. Note that the length a of the primi ...
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Stishovite
Stishovite is an extremely hard, dense tetragonal form ( polymorph) of silicon dioxide. It is very rare on the Earth's surface; however, it may be a predominant form of silicon dioxide in the Earth, especially in the lower mantle. Stishovite was named after Sergey M. Stishov, a Russian high-pressure physicist who first synthesized the mineral in 1961. It was discovered in Meteor Crater in 1962 by Edward C. T. Chao. Unlike other silica polymorphs, the crystal structure of stishovite resembles that of rutile (TiO2). The silicon in stishovite adopts an octahedral coordination geometry, being bound to six oxides. Similarly, the oxides are three-connected, unlike low-pressure forms of SiO2. In most silicates, silicon is tetrahedral, being bound to four oxides. It was long considered the hardest known oxide (~30 GPa Vickers); however, boron suboxide has been discovered in 2002 to be much harder. At normal temperature and pressure, stishovite is metastable. Stishovite can be se ...
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Stishovite
Stishovite is an extremely hard, dense tetragonal form ( polymorph) of silicon dioxide. It is very rare on the Earth's surface; however, it may be a predominant form of silicon dioxide in the Earth, especially in the lower mantle. Stishovite was named after Sergey M. Stishov, a Russian high-pressure physicist who first synthesized the mineral in 1961. It was discovered in Meteor Crater in 1962 by Edward C. T. Chao. Unlike other silica polymorphs, the crystal structure of stishovite resembles that of rutile (TiO2). The silicon in stishovite adopts an octahedral coordination geometry, being bound to six oxides. Similarly, the oxides are three-connected, unlike low-pressure forms of SiO2. In most silicates, silicon is tetrahedral, being bound to four oxides. It was long considered the hardest known oxide (~30 GPa Vickers); however, boron suboxide has been discovered in 2002 to be much harder. At normal temperature and pressure, stishovite is metastable. Stishovite can be se ...
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Space Group
In mathematics, physics and chemistry, a space group is the symmetry group of an object in space, usually in three dimensions. The elements of a space group (its symmetry operations) are the rigid transformations of an object that leave it unchanged. In three dimensions, space groups are classified into 219 distinct types, or 230 types if chiral copies are considered distinct. Space groups are discrete cocompact groups of isometries of an oriented Euclidean space in any number of dimensions. In dimensions other than 3, they are sometimes called Bieberbach groups. In crystallography, space groups are also called the crystallographic or Fedorov groups, and represent a description of the symmetry of the crystal. A definitive source regarding 3-dimensional space groups is the ''International Tables for Crystallography'' . History Space groups in 2 dimensions are the 17 wallpaper groups which have been known for several centuries, though the proof that the list was complete was ...
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Orthorhombic
In crystallography, the orthorhombic crystal system is one of the 7 crystal systems. Orthorhombic lattices result from stretching a cubic lattice along two of its orthogonal pairs by two different factors, resulting in a rectangular prism with a rectangular base (''a'' by ''b'') and height (''c''), such that ''a'', ''b'', and ''c'' are distinct. All three bases intersect at 90° angles, so the three lattice vectors remain mutually orthogonal. Bravais lattices There are four orthorhombic Bravais lattices: primitive orthorhombic, base-centered orthorhombic, body-centered orthorhombic, and face-centered orthorhombic. For the base-centered orthorhombic lattice, the primitive cell has the shape of a right rhombic prism;See , row oC, column Primitive, where the cell parameters are given as a1 = a2, α = β = 90° it can be constructed because the two-dimensional centered rectangular base layer can also be described with primitive rhombic axes. Note that the length a of the prim ...
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Lead Dioxide
Lead(IV) oxide is the inorganic compound with the formula PbO2. It is an oxide where lead is in an oxidation state of +4. It is a dark-brown solid which is insoluble in water. It exists in two crystalline forms. It has several important applications in electrochemistry, in particular as the positive plate of lead acid batteries. Properties Physical Lead dioxide has two major polymorphs, alpha and beta, which occur naturally as rare minerals scrutinyite and plattnerite, respectively. Whereas the beta form had been identified in 1845, α-PbO2 was first identified in 1946 and found as a naturally occurring mineral 1988. The alpha form has orthorhombic symmetry, space group Pbcn (No. 60), Pearson symbol ''oP''12, lattice constants ''a'' = 0.497 nm, ''b'' = 0.596 nm, ''c'' = 0.544 nm, ''Z'' = 4 (four formula units per unit cell). The lead atoms are six-coordinate. The symmetry of the beta form is tetragonal, space group P42/mnm (No. 136), Pearson symbol ''tP''6, la ...
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Scrutinyite
Scrutinyite is a rare oxide mineral and is the alpha crystalline form of lead dioxide (α-PbO2), plattnerite being the other, beta form. The mineral was first reported in 1988 and its name reflects the scrutiny and efforts required to identify it from a very limited amount of available sample material. Identification The synthetic orthorhombic form of lead dioxide, α-PbO2, was known from 1941. Although natural lead dioxide has been known, as the mineral plattnerite (β-PbO2), since 1845,Haidinger W (1845Zweite Klasse: Geogenide. II. Ordnung. Baryte VII. Bleibaryt. Plattnerit. p. 500 in Handbuch der Bestimmenden Mineralogie Bei Braumüller and Seidel Wien pp. 499-506 (in German) its alpha form could only be recognized in 1981 and reliably identified in 1988. The new mineral was spotted in several samples collected at Bingham, New Mexico and Mapimí, Durango, Mexico. It was first thought to be minium ( lead tetroxide mineral) because of its high lead content, brown color and a ...
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