Abstract:
The cat eye effect is precious for serpentine cat's eye, which is very rare around the world, and is found previously only in California from USA, namely, the California's cat's eye. Recently, this rare serpentine cat's eye, with high value of appreciation and collection, was found in Shimian county of Sichuan province, southwest of China. In this paper, electron probe microanalysis (EPMA)、laser Raman、electron paramagnetism resonance spectra (EPR) and nuclear magnetic resonance spectra (NMR) were used to study the serpentine cat's eye samples from Sichuan province. The results indicate that the major average chemical compositions (mass fraction) of the Sichuan serpentine cat's eye are SiO
2 (43.56%), MgO(40.52%), FeO+Fe
2O
3(2.14%) and MnO(0.05%). The major color ions in serpentine cat's eyes from Sichuan province are Fe
3+ and Mn
2+. The Raman bands of -OH near 3 700 cm
-1 of serpentine cat's eyes from Sichuan show a clear difference with those of other ordinary serpentine samples:the Raman bands near 3 700 cm
-1 split off and shift to low wavenumbers, which is related to the content of color ion, location of Fe
3+ and Mn
2+ and the isomorphous substitution degree of Mg
2+ with Fe
3+ and Mn
2+. Fe
3+ and Mn
2+ occupy the position of Mg
2+ in the octahedral Mg-O(OH) of serpentine. The color of the samples changes from lower yellow-green to dark brown green with the increasing of the substitution degree of Mg
2+. Therefore, the octahedral Mg-O(OH) of serpentine partly divides into octahedral(Fe
3+,Mn
2+),Mg
2+-O(OH) as confirmed by
1H-NMR.