Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Effect Of Thermal Treatment On The Cation Exchange And Disordering In Tourmaline, Jacob Stern Menken

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Tourmaline is an aluminoborocyclosilicate mineral with a complex arrangement of atoms. With highly variable chemistry and multiple cation sites, tourmaline is one of the last complex minerals whose structure was unraveled, and its response to changes in Pressure-Temperature-Time (P-T-X) are not well understood. Due to its stability at high temperature and pressure, tourmaline has the potential to be an informative mineral in terms of petrogenetic indicators and could be used in assessing provenance, thermobarometry and geochronology. Three reactions were proposed to understand the cation exchange and disordering between the Y- and Z-sites in the tourmaline structure. These reactions …