What is "perovskite"

Perofskite \Per*of"skite\, n. [From von Perovski, of St.Petersburg.] (Min.) A titanate of lime occurring in octahedral or cubic crystals.

n. (context mineralogy English) A minor accessory mineral, calciumtitaniumoxygen₃, occurring in basic rocks, as orthorhombic crystals.

A perovskite is any material with the same type of crystal structure as calcium titanium oxide (CaTiO), known as the perovskite structure, or ABX with the oxygen in the face centers. Perovskites take their name from the mineral, which was first discovered in the Ural mountains of Russia by Gustav Rose in 1839 and is named after Russian mineralogist L. A. Perovski (1792–1856). The general chemical formula for perovskite compounds is ABX, where 'A' and 'B' are two cations of very different sizes, and X is an anion that bonds to both. The 'A' atoms are larger than the 'B' atoms. The ideal cubic-symmetry structure has the B cation in 6-fold coordination, surrounded by an octahedron of anions, and the A cation in 12-fold cuboctahedral coordination. The relative ion size requirements for stability of the cubic structure are quite stringent, so slight buckling and distortion can produce several lower-symmetry distorted versions, in which the coordination numbers of A cations, B cations or both are reduced.

Natural compounds with this structure are perovskite, loparite, and the silicate perovskite bridgmanite.

Perovskite (pronunciation: ) is a calcium titanium oxide mineral composed of calcium titanate, with the chemical formula Ca Ti O. The mineral was discovered in the Ural Mountains of Russia by Gustav Rose in 1839 and is named after Russian mineralogist Lev Perovski (1792–1856).

It lends its name to the class of compounds which have the same type of crystal structure as CaTiO (ABX) known as the perovskite structure. The perovskite crystal structure was first described by Victor Goldschmidt in 1926, in his work on tolerance factors. The crystal structure was later published in 1945 from X-ray diffraction data on barium titanate by Helen Dick Megaw.