On the occasion of the 65th birthday of K Alex Muller (KAM), the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Ruschlikon, with the help of J. Georg Bednorz, offered a compilation of almost all the publications he had authored or co-authored. Those two volumes encompass thewritings until 1992. They are very useful to access KAM's earlier work, with the more than 300 papers arranged in chronological order. When KAM turned seventy, Prof. KK Phua, chairman of World Scientific, suggested to collect relevant original work in a volume to be published by this well-established house. After some reflection, Muller thought this might be a reasonable undertaking, and selected, from the then more than 400 original publications, those he considered the relevant ones. The result is this book with its eleven chapters, arranged in topological rather than chronological order. In each chapter the pertinent publications in one specific area of investigations are grouped together. Therefore it should be easy for the reader to find a paper of interest to him or her. To bring this work up to date, it also includes KAM's articles on the topics in this book published after 1992 and publications by Tom Kool, the second author, who worked in the field of oxide perovskites as well and kept helping to realize and edit the present volume <...>

The contributions of this book arose from a conference on "Mineralogy and analytics of highpurity Si02 raw materials" held in June 2011 in Freiberg, Germany. The 15 chapters are written by international experts and reflect the state of the art in the field of quartz and silica raw materials. The book covers the broad field of Si02 minerals and rocks and shows the progress made during the last decades in the evaluation of deposits and the application of advanced characterization methods to study the genesis and properties of these materials.

In the broad sense the subject of this book belongs to the properties and specifics of both natural and synthetic materials of the Si02 system. The chapters are dealing mainly with the mineral quartz, which is one of the most frequent minerals of the Earth's crust and also an important raw material in the industry. Therefore, the book is addressed to graduate students and scientists in mineralogy, geology, chemistry, physics, materials science and engineering, as well as to people from the industry, who are working with the processing and technical application of quartz and Si02 material.

In Earth Sciences and Cultural Heritage Science we can only understand the formation of the 'objects' if they are well characterized. Optical observation, including optical microscopy, is still the primary tool and is essential in obtaining a preliminary, qualitative determination of an object, to determine the relations between it and other objects, and to place it in a general context. Most of the time, however, optical observations are insufficient. Spectroscopic methods are the second "set of eyes" used to gain greater insight into these objects and to use physical chemistry, if applicable, to derive the mechanisms of formation. Spectroscopic methods are numerous and have been described in a previous volume (6) in the EMU Notes in Mineralogy series, edited by A. Beran & E. Libowitzky (2004).

Garnets occur in more than 30 natural mineral parageneses forming the rocks of magmatic, metamorphoric and metasomatic origin, which suggests their crystallization in a wide range of physicochemical parameters. By the ratio of main components (Ca, Mg, Al, Fe, Cr, Mn), garnets are divided into two major groups: almandine (pyrope, almandine, and spessartite) and andradite (grossular, andradite, and uvarovite). Pyropes are contained mainly in high-temperature peridotites and eclogites from deep xenoliths carried by kimberlite and alkaline-basaltic melts. In high-temperature and mesobaric metamorphic complexes (eclogites, granulites, gneisses, and schist), as well as in metasomatic rocks (skarns) garnets are represented by the varieties of almandine-grossular-pyrope series. When systematizing garnets by chemical compositions and parageneses in which they occur, normally different binary diagrams are used, including the diagrams in CaO–Cr2O3 coordinates [Sobolev, 1964; Sobolev et al., 1973]. <...>