Quartz metastability at high pressure: what new can we learn from polarized Raman spectroscopy?

Despite all the work we have done on it, quartz can still surprise us! In their new paper Marta, Boriana, Ross and Matteo characterize the Raman scattering of quartz under hydrostatic conditions up to 9 GPa and provide new calibrations for a larger number of modes in a pressure range covering the stability field of three polymorphs of SiO2. Their work also shows how to use polarized Raman spectroscopy to extract detailed information even from complex samples such as quartz inclusions trapped in other minerals and gives new insights on the stability of the structure of quartz at ambient conditions.

The full manuscript is available at this link