Possibly a dumb question, but why can't we grow synthetic quartz in the same way we grow silicon wafers? Or can we and it's just not cost effective vs mining?
We can but synthetic quartz faces the same problem as hydrocarbon fuels: we can make synthetic natural gas if we use enough energy, or we could exploit the geological processes that created it over millions of years and extract it.
High-purity quartz from areas like Spruce Pine typically forms in pegmatites, where slow cooling of magma allows large, defect-free crystals to form. Hydrothermal fluids permeate these rocks while they’re cooling, effectively leaching out impurities. If the geochemistry is just right, over millions of years, this process repeats several times creating very high purity quartz deposits that are very difficult to replicate in laboratory conditions.
We can, using big autoclaves and a process called hydrothermal synthesis. It's how we make single crystals that get sliced and diced into quartz oscillators. But the process takes a long time, think mm/day, and isn't really appropriate for making big things like crucibles.
throwup238|1 year ago
High-purity quartz from areas like Spruce Pine typically forms in pegmatites, where slow cooling of magma allows large, defect-free crystals to form. Hydrothermal fluids permeate these rocks while they’re cooling, effectively leaching out impurities. If the geochemistry is just right, over millions of years, this process repeats several times creating very high purity quartz deposits that are very difficult to replicate in laboratory conditions.
justinclift|1 year ago
Single crystal sapphires ~250kg are grown in production, so it should be possible with reasonable effort to do similar for quartz:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyropoulos_method
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Seems like it already is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz#Synthetic_and_artificia...
No mention there of purity though.
westurner|1 year ago
/? nanoassembly of quartz https://www.google.com/search?q=nanoassembly%20of%20quartz mentions hydrothermal synthesis,
Which other natural processes affect the formation of quartz and gold?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41437036#41442489 :
> "Gold nugget formation from earthquake-induced piezoelectricity in quartz" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01514-1 [...]
> Are there phononic excitations from earthquake-induced piezoelectric and pyroelectric effects?
> Do (surface) plasmon polaritons SPhP affect the interactions between quartz and gold, given heat and vibration as from an earthquake?
> "Extreme light confinement and control in low-symmetry phonon-polaritonic crystals" like quartz https://arxiv.org/html/2312.06805v2
zakqwy|1 year ago