A Review of the Structural Architecture of Tellurium Oxycompounds
Mineralogical Magazine, May 2016, Vol. 80(3), pp. 415–545 REVIEW OPEN ACCESS A review of the structural architecture of tellurium oxycompounds 1 2,* 3 A. G. CHRISTY ,S.J.MILLS AND A. R. KAMPF 1 Research School of Earth Sciences and Department of Applied Mathematics, Research School of Physics and Engineering, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia 2 Geosciences, Museum Victoria, GPO Box 666, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia 3 Mineral Sciences Department, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA [Received 24 November 2015; Accepted 23 February 2016; Associate Editor: Mark Welch] ABSTRACT Relative to its extremely low abundance in the Earth’s crust, tellurium is the most mineralogically diverse chemical element, with over 160 mineral species known that contain essential Te, many of them with unique crystal structures. We review the crystal structures of 703 tellurium oxysalts for which good refinements exist, including 55 that are known to occur as minerals. The dataset is restricted to compounds where oxygen is the only ligand that is strongly bound to Te, but most of the Periodic Table is represented in the compounds that are reviewed. The dataset contains 375 structures that contain only Te4+ cations and 302 with only Te6+, with 26 of the compounds containing Te in both valence states. Te6+ was almost exclusively in rather regular octahedral coordination by oxygen ligands, with only two instances each of 4- and 5-coordination. Conversely, the lone-pair cation Te4+ displayed irregular coordination, with a broad range of coordination numbers and bond distances.
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