Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear editor,

I have reviewed the manuscript entitled "Structure analysis of natural wangdaodeite – LiNbO3-type FeTiO3" by Tschauner et al.

This very nice work has been excellently executed and the conclusions that are extracted (though the authors have forgotten to add a section for conclusions in the manuscript) are very interesting for the community. The finding of natural LiNbO3-FeTiO3 and its structural solution are of great importance considering that it is a polar phase and a potential multiferroic.

The state of the art techniques employed are analyzed to the maximum. The only disappointing point is the lack of a Raman spectroscopy study. The authors put a lot of effort on predicting the behavior of the modes but they have not carried any experiment. Similarly to microfocus XRD doing Raman spectroscopy could have provided a complementary technique to map the sample and support many of their conclusions. In my opinion, this point would make the paper move from interesting but average to highly interesting.

Since I understand that if the authors have not included any Raman study is because of their difficulty to have access to a Raman setup, I will not ask them to include such study and though it would be highly recommended.

What has to be fixed is including a section for the conclusions.

In summary I recommend the manuscript for it acceptance in Minerals after including a proper conclusions section and giving at least a plausible explanation about the lack of a Raman experiment.

 

Author Response

Reviewer 1:
We thank the reviewer for the very positive comments. We fully agree that a Raman spectrum of wangdaodeite from the Ries would be a useful complement to the reported spectrum of the type material from the Suizhou chondrite (Xie et al. 2020) but we cannot collect a spectrum right now nor were we able to collect one prior submission - despite the best intentions. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic it will impossible to collect a spectrum for a period of unknown length. Since Xie et al. published a spectrum, the absence of a reference spectrum for the second occurrence is not a fundamental problem.
We added the missing Conclusion section.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

It would be nice to add an additional table presenting crystallographic data of ilmenite, synthetic and wangdaodeite, as suggested in my review.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see attached response!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf