empressite

Also known as AgTe

Empressite or tellursilberblende is a mineral form of silver telluride, AgTe. It is a rare, grey, orthorhombic mineral with which can form compact masses, rarely as bipyramidal crystals.

Wikidata facts

Subclass of: sulfide class of minerals
Image: Empressite-583052.jpg

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chemical formula: AgTe
Nickel-Strunz '10th ed', review of (9th ed/ 2009 update): 2.CB.80
Nickel-Strunz 9th edition (updated 2009): 2.CB.80
crystal system: orthorhombic crystal system
Commons category: Empressite
IMA Mineral Symbol: Eps
Strunz 8th edition (series ID, updated): II/A.03 – Anhang

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Empressite or tellursilberblende is a mineral form of silver telluride, AgTe. It is a rare, grey, orthorhombic mineral with which can form compact masses, rarely as bipyramidal crystals.

Recent crystallographic analysis has confirmed that empressite is a distinct mineral with orthorhombic crystal structure, different from the hexagonal Ag5−xTe3 with which empressite has been commonly confused in mineralogy literature. At the same time, empressite does not appear on the equilibrium Ag-Te phase diagram, and therefore it is only metastable at ambient conditions. Given infinite time, it would phase separate into pure Ag5Te3 and pure Te.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “empressite” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.