Ricerc@Sapienza

The future supply of rare chemical elements is a major concern of the global economy due to the imbalance between supply and demand. Strategic elements are considered those elements that are at greatest risk of supply disruption or are important to a country¿s economy or defense, and include rare earth elements, platinum group elements and trace metals. The demand of rare elements increased enormously in the recent years, due to the large use for the production of new technologies, from consumable of electronic goods, the clean energy and green economy technologies. Even in the frame of a circular economy, the look for alternative resources is a necessary pathway to sustain the evolving technology.
Pegmatites are important reservoirs of rare elements, due to their peculiar petrologic significance and petro-chemical characteristics. Despite the interest for pegmatites has been largely motivated by the exploration for the economic commodities, the ore-forming mechanisms are still poorly understood and, in some cases, controversial. Understanding these mechanisms is indeed extremely important, not only for the direct impact in modeling the transport of rare elements, but also for the development of new techniques for extraction. With the present proposal, we aim to fill this gap by combining a fundamental research, aimed to understand the geochemical behavior (mobilization, transport and accumulation) of rare elements during pegmatite formation, with an experimental development of novel protocols for individuation, sizing and put-into-production of magmatic ore deposits.