Hydrothermal synthesis as a route to mineralogically-inspired structures

Abstract

The use of high temperature hydrothermal reactions to prepare crystals having mineralogically-related structures is described. Complex naturally occurring minerals can have fascinating structures and exhibit important features like low dimensionality, noncentrosymmetry, or ion channels that can provide excellent guideposts for the designed synthesis of new materials. Actual minerals, even though they may have intriguing physical properties, are often unsuitable for study because of the persistent impurities inevitably present in natural samples. Hydrothermal fluids at relatively high temperatures provide access to large, high quality single crystals of structures with mineral-like structures. This enables the study of physical properties like ionic conduction, magnetic spin frustration and non-linear optical behavior. Some fundamental considerations of the hydrothermal technique are discussed in the context of synthesizing mineralogically-inspired materials. The metal vanadates provide a surprisingly rich and diversified range of compounds and are selected to illustrate many of the concepts described here. A series of low dimensional mineral analogs featuring isolated units, chains, and layers have been prepared in the laboratory as large single crystals using a high temperature hydrothermal synthetic methods, and their physical properties are under investigation. The metal silicates are also highlighted as another promising field of exploration, since their hydrothermal synthesis surprisingly lags behind the enormous literature of the natural silicate minerals. The introduction of heteroelements, such as boron to make borosilicates, appears to also open the door to additional new materials. Many of these new materials have direct equivalents in the mineral kingdom, while others have no known analogs but are reminiscent of minerals and can be classified in the same ways. From these initial results there appears to be a very rich vein of synthetic minerals waiting to be unearthed in the laboratory using the high temperature hydrothermal method.