A newly discovered mineral called kanatzidisite was recently discovered in the tailings of the abandoned Nagybörzsöny gold mine near Alsó-Rózsa in northern Hungary.
Kanatzidisite belongs to a class of materials known as chalcogenides, which are sulphur-containing materials used in the production of copper metal in ancient times. Today they are used in catalytic reactions that are key to fuel production, solar cells and other materials.
“This new material could be a number of things – it could be a good thermoelectric material, which can absorb heat to generate electricity. It could be a topological quantum material, which could be used for energy conversion, or even a superconductor. But we need researchers to figure out how to make it so we can study more of it,” said Mercouri Kanatzidis, a materials scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and professor at Northwestern University, in a media statement.
Kanatzidisite, of course, takes its name from Kanatzidis, who has been studying chalcogenides for decades and whose focus at Argonne Lab is on the implications of these minerals for new potential superconductors as well as X-ray and gamma-ray detectors.
The researcher got his start in chalcogenide chemistry as a graduate student, working on sulphur-containing analogs of biological enzymes.
“One of the most important catalytic reactions in the world is the hydrodesulphurisation of crude oil, a catalytic process that removes sulphur from natural gas and refined petroleum. It uses molybdenum sulphide, which is an important chalcogenide. If you take that catalyst out of the picture, our economy collapses,” says Kanatzidis.
“I wanted to understand what stabilises these compounds, and then I wanted to make new chalcogenides – to design, predict and synthesise new materials, which is what I’ve been doing for more than 30 years.”
Despite his long career, the black mineral that bears his name – whose chemical formula is (SbBiS3)2Te2 – isn’t something he’s ever created in the lab. Although it has structural elements similar to those he has worked with, kanatzidisite uses different building blocks.
These new “building blocks” have inspired Kanatzidis to pursue new ideas in the laboratory.
“There’s a loop of discovery that’s emerging,” he said. “There is knowledge in the geological world about what is being done synthetically in the lab, and the principles that are being discovered by the geologists can lead us chemists to greater heights and new discoveries.”
