Abstract
In this article, we first present and discuss eighteenth-century descriptions of minerals that contributed decisively to the development of crystallography. Remarkably, these old crystallographic descriptions included morphologies with symmetries incompatible with an internal periodic order of atoms, which, however, have been recognised to be characteristics of quasicrystals. Moreover, we also review a number of studies of minerals with aperiodic crystal structures, including recently reported natural quasicrystals of extra-terrestrial origin. Finally, we discuss the current investigations addressing the search for new quasicrystalline minerals in nature.
Highlights
The development of crystallography has been closely interwoven with mineralogical investigation.Minerals were the first accessible crystalline solids that scientists were able to study and measure systematically in order to derive the first crystallographic laws
The discovery of quasicrystals, whose pentagonal symmetries are noticeably incompatible with a periodic order of atoms [9], definitively challenged the fundamentals of crystallography
The crystallographic paradigm based on a strict periodic atomic order was definitively established thanks to X-ray diffraction by crystals
Summary
The development of crystallography has been closely interwoven with mineralogical investigation. In 1991, the International Union of Crystallography stated that “a crystal is any solid having an essentially discrete diffraction diagram”, a definition which intentionally avoids the term “periodic” [10] In this case, the new developments in crystallography and the subsequent redefinition of crystal resulted from the study not of minerals but of synthetic alloys. Synthesis experiments and crystallochemical analyses suggest that a number of minerals could be transformed into quasicrystals under extreme pressure and temperature conditions on Earth [14,15,16] Finding such mineral quasicrystals of terrestrial origin is relevant to the investigation of the formation conditions of aperiodic crystals in nature and would constitute a new contribution of mineralogical studies to the advancement of crystallography.
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