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Growth evolution in calcium carbonate microparticles involving mixed vaterite-aragonite structures

Daniyal Younas1, Elizaveta Sidler1, Chayene G. Anchieta1, Seniz Ucar2,3, Per Erik Vullum4, Ragnvald H. Mathiesen1, Federico Zontone5, Raffaela Cabriolu1, Yuriy Chushkin5 et al.

Dag Werner Breiby1 and Basab Chattopadhyay1,*

  • *Contact author: basab.chattopadhyay@ntnu.no
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 013051 – Published 20 January, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/vtzb-dlwt

Abstract

Calcium carbonate (CaCO3) is a widely occurring mineral that is crucial to many natural and synthetic processes. CaCO3 crystallizes in three anhydrous polymorphs and often serves as a model system to study nucleation and growth phenomena. In this article, we employ coherent diffraction imaging coupled with wide-angle x-ray diffraction (CXDI-WAXD) to investigate the three-dimensional (3D) morphology and crystal structure of CaCO3 microparticles crystallized under different reaction temperatures. We report particles containing both vaterite and aragonite, which we interpret as an intermediate growth stage between early vaterite and later aragonite formation. The results are based on the density variations observed in the 3D tomographic CXDI images, x-ray diffraction, and focussed ion beam-transmission electron microscopy study of the mixed vaterite-aragonite microparticles. A computational study based on Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics energy minimization was used to identify the small energetic variations between the different crystalline forms of CaCO3. The results presented in this article provide a better understanding of the morphology-structure correlation for CaCO3 polymorphs, depicting a transitional stage where both vaterite and aragonite coexist.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 013051– Published 20 January, 2026
  • Received 24 September 2025
  • Accepted 18 December 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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