Molybdenite
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- Lustre:Metallic
- Transparency:Opaque
- Colour:Black, lead gray, or gray
- Comment:Pale yellow to deepish reddish brown in transmitted light
- Streak:Bluish gray
- Hardness:1 - 1½ on Mohs scale
- Tenacity:Flexible
- Cleavage:Perfect Perfect on {0001}
An extremely soft mineral, molybdenite visually has extremely bright reflectance that looks like galena, but has a distinct hexagonal structure on close inspection. It splits easily into flexible sheets. Quite rare in Cornwall, and where it does occur it forms in fairly small specks among other minerals.
As a semiconductor, molybdenite goes back to the dawn of the radio era, is it was often used then - but it is now thought to be a future replacement for silicon, and it's those thin sheets that are the reason. It's possible to grow a form of it where molybdenum and the sulphur are single atom thick layers, transistors can be made using these layers enabling them be up to a thousand times less power hungry than silicon devices.
I was surprised how easy it was to obtain this curve trace, I could see the cat's whiskers marking the molybdenite as I tried to position them. However, it immediately formed the curve trace shown here - and it remained consistent for over 20 minutes, which is also very unusual for these materials.