Structural Characterization of Natural Quartz by Scanning TEM

For quartz, despite its industrial importance and an extensive amount of research done on it, there are still open fundamental questions, e.g. regarding crystal defects, phase changes or damage mechanisms under ionizing radiation [1,2]. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), widely deployed to investigate crystal structures down to Å level, has scarcely been published with respect to quartz in the last decades. The reason for this, beside challenges in preparing good specimens, is that this mineral is very beam sensitive and rapidly becomes amorphous during TEM investigations.