Stishovite structural properties

Silica has 22 polymorphs, although only some of them are of geochemical interest—namely, the crystalline polymorphs quartz, tridymite, cristobahte, coesite, and stishovite (in their structural modifications of low and high T, usually designated, respectively, as a and jS forms) and the amorphous phases chalcedony and opal (hydrated amorphous silica). The crystalline polymorphs of silica are tectosilicates (dimensionality = 3). Table 5.68 reports their structural properties, after the synthesis of Smyth and Bish (1988). Note that the number of formula units per unit cell varies conspicuously from phase to phase. Also noteworthy is the high density of the stishovite polymorph. 

The potential of Eq. (1) with parameters determined in Refs. [10, 11] was thoroughly tested in computer simulations of silica polymorphs. In Ref. [10], the structural parameters and bulk modulus of cc-quartz, a-cristobalite, coesite, and stishovite obtained from molecular dynamics computer simulations were found to be in good agreement with the experimental data. The a to / structural phase transition of quartz at 850 K ha.s also been successfully reproduced [12]. The vibrational properties computed with the same potential for these four polymorphs of crystalline silica only approximately reproduce the experimental data [9]. Even better results were reported in Ref. [5] where parameters of the two-body potential Eq. (1) were taken from Ref. [11]. It was found that the calculated static structures of silica polymorphs are in excellent agreement with experiments. In particular, with the pressure - volume equation of state for a -quartz, cristobalite, and stishovite, the pressure-induced amorphization transformation in a -quartz and the thermally induced a — j3 transformation in cristobalite are well reproduced by the model. However, the calculated vibrational spectra were only in fair agreement with experiments. 

Many calculations of mineral properties have been carried out with spherical ion electron gas models. For example, early investigations of CaO predicted that the B1 phase would transform to the B2 phase at approximately 1 megabar [33] later experiments substantiated this prediction [34]. Results for silica predicted that stishovite would transform to the CaCl2 structure at megabar pressures [35] subsequent experimental evidence suggested that this phase transition does in fact occur at approximately 1 megabar [36,37]. Temperature and pressure dependences of the structural and elastic properties of simple oxide minerals have also been calculated [27, 38, 39, 40]. 

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