I went on a trip to DC last fall. Almost accidentally I ended up in the Natural History Smithsonian Museum. Wow! Especially worthy is the section on minerals. I assume there are other museums with such displays, but I hadn’t been to one. The Hope diamond is displayed also in the minerals section, but fancy jewels I can’t touch are way less interesting than all the minerals and natural crystals.

I find crystals fascinating because they tell you so much about the microscopic structure of the material. Where else in life can you just look at an object and see what it does down to the nanometer? So naturally the camera came out. Below are a few favorites, and some comments about what we can infer from the pictures.

Fluorite (CaF₂): As you can see, Fluorite has a cubic crystalline structure. Fluorite can come in basically any color. Color can be due to impurities, exposure to radiation, or defects in the crystalline structure. Fluorite was originally so named due to fluorescent properties; fluorite can fluoresce in a variety of colors depending upon the impurities present.

Beryl (Be₃Al₂(SiO₃)₆): You might be more familiar with other names for Beryl, such as aquamarine or emerald or morganite. Beryl is naturally clear, but takes on color in the presence of impurities. Emerald, for example, has chromium or vanadium present. Aquamarine coloration results when the Fe²⁺ oxidation state is present. Fe³⁺ results in yellow coloration. You can see in the image above that beryl has a hexagonal crystal structure. You can also see that this is one big hexagonal crystal, unlike the population of cubes in the fluorite picture. This tells us a lot about how the crystal grew. If the crystal grew very fast, there would be a number of columns, because crystallization would be faster than the time for the mineral components to diffuse to one specific column. So this crystal grew pretty slowly.

Wulfenite (PbMoO₄): Wulfenite is often found around lead deposits, which makes sense since it contains lead. It has a tetragonal crystal structure, and tends to be yellow or orange or brown in color. You can see that the crystals are much smaller in this picture than the beryl crystal. Clearly these crystals grew quickly from many nucleation sites. The size to which crystals tend to grow is a property of the crystal too; some only form a ton of small crystals, some form a few very large ones. It depends whether it is lower energy to just form another crystal, or if it is lower energy to allow diffusion to an already established crystal. This is related to thermodynamics. Wulfenite seems to favor lots of small crystals. Some wulfenite has a really cool property called piezoelectricity; when there is the right kind of pressure on the crystal, an electric charge accumulates.

Manganese dioxide (MnO₂): This manganese dioxide has grown in a dendritic fashion. It might look like frost or snowflakes, which grow in similar ways. These dendrites are very fractal, a favorite topic of mine. Here diffusion was definitely limited, so crystals grew where the materials were present.

Chalcedony (SiO₂): Chalcedony is a type of silicon dioxide, which is the chemical composition of most sand. Chalcedony is composed of two different silicon dioxide minerals: quartz and moganite. Quartz and moganite have different crystalline structures which grow together at a fine scale in chalcedony, which is probably why it looks far less geometric than the other crystals I’ve shown. Agate is a type of chalcedony.