The crystal-structures of the sulphides of mercury

Abstract

Mercuric sulphide, HgS, occurs in nature as two well-known modifications, cinnabar and metacinnabarite. The latter is some what rare and occurs as black cubic crystals possessing the symmetry of the zinc-bleude, i.e. the ditesseral polar-class. It is considered to be identical with chemically precipitated black mercuric sulphide, the density of both being 7.81. Cinnabar is of more common occurrence and is found as well-defined crystals and in the massive state. The crystals are assigned to the trigonal holoaxial class. The rhombohedral angle is 92°30' r correspouding to an axial ratio c/a of 1.1453. The crystals possess a very good cleavage parallel to the prism (21̄1̄)=(101̄0). The rotation of the plane of polarization, for red light traversing the crystal in a direction parallel to the optic axis, is 315° per millimetre, a value roughly eighteen times that of a similar thickness of quartz.

Interaction of mercury and selenium in the larval stage zebrafish vertebrate model

“…The familiar red form, α-HgS, is thermodynamically favored at ambient conditions and has a structure named for its mineral form, cinnabar, with chains of two-coordinate mercury and sulfur. 29 The black form, β-HgS, known mineralogically as metacinnabar, is kinetically favored being quite close in energy to α-HgS, and is isostructural with bulk HgSe having the zincblende structure with four-coordinate tetrahedral Hg and S. In mineral formations tiemannite often contains substitution of sulfur for selenium in its structure as the mixed chalcogenide HgS x Se (1-x) with almost the whole range of HgSe to HgS compositions having been observed. 30 Synthetic colloidal clusters of HgS x Se (1-x) , varying in size between 2 and 3 nm, were Fig.…”

Reactivity of transition-metal alloys to oxygen and sulphur

“…Overall our work provides a first rough navigation map across the binary and ternary transition metal composition space, which is useful to categorise materials according to their propensity to oxidation and tarnishing. A more accurate analysis may include the refinement of the descriptor, possibly with the help of machine-learning schemes 25 , and the determination of novel Brønsted-Evans-Polanyi relations for O-and S-containing atmospheric gases, 26 [159,28]…”

Pigments — Mercury-based red (cinnabar-vermilion) and white (calomel) and their degradation products

“…Studied since the early decades of the 1900s (Buckley and Vernon 1925;Olhausen 1925;Ramsdell 1925), its structure has been further provided by Berry and Thompson (1962), Auvray and Genet (1973) and Schleid et al (1999).…”