Quartz (doubly-terminated)

Item Description

When it comes to crystallized specimen of Quartz, there is no other area in the US that rivals the amazing deposits in Arkansas. Certainly in terms of both quantity and quality, the top Quartz specimens from this area rival the finest colorless Quartzes from just about anywhere else in the world. I've seen plates measuring several feet across that are just loaded with superb, well-formed crystals, and I've seen single crystals from Arkansas that are as impressive as anything from the Swiss Alps, Brazil or anywhere else in terms of quality and morphology. This piece is a great small cabinet example of this classic material featuring several sharp, lustrous, WATER-clear, colorless, hexagonal prisms of Quartz, free of matrix. The main crystal on the specimen measures 6.2 cm long, and is doubly-terminated, which is not terribly common to see in this material, and it's aesthetically set perpendicular to the smaller underlying supporting crystals. I can see a few tiny "Wilbers", but the piece is in great shape and displays wonderfully as you can see from the video.
From the collection of Armon McPherson, a retired physicist, now living in New Mexico. Armon received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1985, and worked at the laser laboratory at the University of Illinois at Circle Center. In the summer of 1997, Armon moved to the Argonne National Laboratory where he worked at the Advanced Photon Source, then the world’s largest synchrotron facility dedicated as an x-ray source. In 2001, he was asked to join a team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque to conduct laser research for DARPA. Finally, staying within Sandia, he transferred to the Z Facility, the world’s most powerful x-ray facility. He retired in the spring of 2017. Armon's introduction to mineral collecting came in the 1980s during graduate school when he attended his first mineral show. He took up the hobby of faceting gems, and focused his early collection on gem crystals, and later transitioned into collecting non-gem species. We are proud to offer specimens from his worldwide mineral collection here for you.