Seminars Archive

Transition and trace elements in synthetic/natural glasses and minerals

Abstract
In the last decades, synchrotron techniques have been widely used in any field and they have become particularly useful in Earth Sciences. The field of mineralogy dates back hundreds of years, nevertheless, mineral scientists and geochemists are still struggling to understand why various materials behave the way they do, and basic questions are still unanswered. My recent activity has involved the study of transition and trace elements in glasses and minerals in order to understand geophysical and geochemical processes. Here, the study of the role of transition elements in determining the mineral colours will be presented. Four multicoloured tourmalines, where the variation of colours occurs in concentric bands, have been analysed by X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) at the Fe and Mn K-edge, in order to investigate the oxidation state and the site location of Fe and Mn, with the final purpose of understanding the physico-chemical factors affecting their colour.