Dielectric Behavior of Kaolinite and Dickite

A GOOD number of properties of crystals arc directly related to lattice defects such as vacancies, interstitials, dislocations, etc. A~ was pointed out by Dekeyser,' defects in clay minerals have never been considered in attempts to correlate their properties with their structure. The obvious reason for this state of affairs is that pradically nothing is known al.,ou t defects in such complicated lattices, mainly because most of the methods for studying defects in simpler types uf crystal cannot be applied to clays. As rela:,;ation effects in the dielectric properties of ionic crystals can yield information about some of the defects they contain, and as the method can be used with powders, we applied this method to t:, ti clay minerals, In this note we report results obtained for kaolinite and dickite. The minerals, of which the fractions < 2;, were used,