Comparison between different techniques applied to quartz CPO determination in granitoid mylonites

Since the second half of the last century, several techniques have been adopted to resolve the crystallographicpreferred orientation (CPO) of major minerals constituting crustal and mantle rocks.To this aim, many efforts have been made to increase the accuracy of such analytical devices as well as toprogressively reduce the time needed to perform microstructural analysis.It is worth noting that many of these microstructural studies deal with quartz CPO because of the wide occurrenceof this mineral phase in crustal rocks as well as its quite simple chemical composition.In the present work, four different techniques were applied to define CPOs of dynamically recrystallized quartzdomains from naturally deformed rocks collected from a ductile crustal scale shear zone in order to comparetheir advantages and limitation. The selected Alpine shear zone is located in the Aspromonte Massif (CalabrianPeloritani Orogen, southern Italy) representing granitoid lithotypes.The adopted methods span from “classical” universal stage (US), to image analysis technique (CIP), electronback-scattered diffraction (EBSD), and time of flight neutron diffraction (TOF).When compared, bulk texture pole figures obtained by means of these different techniques show a good correlation.Advances in analytical techniques used for microstructural investigations are outlined by discussing resultsof quartz CPO that are presented in this study.