Semi-precious Stone Identification Using Infrared Spectroscopy, 350 pages, full color, spiral bound. Price is $145.00 + $10 s/h in the U.S. Released Winter 2016.

This book is based on about 20 discoveries in infrared on its behavior, used here to identify all semi-precious stones used as faceted stones, in jewelry as cabochons, carvings and ornamental stones. So it includes silicates, carbonates, agates, jaspers, garnets, feldspars, jades, common opal, precious opals, copper minerals, manmade materials, ambers, to name a few groups.

In particular, it uses infrared spectroscopy to identify them, and provides keys of major mineral groups to identify unknowns readily. A host of discoveries in infrared are shown in detail to aide in mineral identification. For example, a master table how to unambiguously identify the type of opal scanned, is provided. It shows several new opal species that have been omitted in the literature due to inadequate understanding of infrared, and the use of spectroscopy methods such as X-rays that cannot be used reliably on opals.

Several major components of this work were reviewed in collaboration and in blind study comparisons to two professors of mineralogy, remote sensing, and infrared technology at Caltech, which covered and reviewed the basic discoveries.

You don't get thrown one graph per mineral, but rather a complete identification set of instructions to differentiate them from other minerals in the same group and those that look similar, or are presumed to be similar. For example, one chapter is dedicated to all the minerals commonly confused with jade, both nephrite and jadeite.

The book appears to be the first for mineralogical identification in infrared, leaving behind primitive and inaccurate techniques such as trying to identify stones by refractive index. Key to the work is the discovery that a number of crystallographic properties define the infrared graphs. This means that those who presume infrared is unreliable and the graphs shift, don't understand how infrared works and substitute their lack of understanding for infrared unreliability. Major mineral groups are first described by their crystallographic patterns in infrared and what they mean. Then the chapters follow up with major samples in each group from around the world.

This book uses reflectance infrared spectroscopy, which does not require damaging the mineral samples studied such as mashing them into powers for transmission infrared. The additional spectral features that occur with reflectance are not noise as presumed by many in previous infrared work, but are actually more data coming from infrared interaction with materials.

This book presents not only a classification of minerals and materials in infrared and how to identify them, but shows new research technology used to achieve that. It is a practical guide to using infrared, and is a research work, laying out mineralogical infrared use with minimal technical understanding needed.

The work was based on some 30,000 spectral graphs and six years work spent on mineral classification in infrared.