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This is Ytterbium. Again, a Lanthanide.
Stored in a very old glass bowl.
Ytterbium is one of three Lanthanides, which was named after
a Swedish town called Ytterby which is where
They were all discovered. Ytterbium, Terbium and Erbium
were all derivatives of that town name.
The town's done well out of it, hasn't it? -The town's did very well out of it, yeah.
Have you ever been there?
No, not personally. -You should go!
Yeah, I should.
It's quite moving, and quite...
Quite stirring to be here in this place because this is
where science and industry came together,
for one of the earliest times I suppose.
And quite a significant place of discovery and economic vibrancy
for the local area. It's almost spiritual,
It's really quite, quite different.
What does it look like? Ytterbium, it depends on
whether talk about metal or as an element.
Often, Ytterbium 2 compounds
as sort of yellows and oranges.
Where did I get it from? From a catalogue.
So Ytterbium, it's a rare earth element, it's a metal.
It's a silvery lustrous metal. It's very soft and it reacts very readily
with oxygen to form a very nice protective oxide layer
which sits over the metal. So it preserves itself after a reaction
with oxygen. It was first identified
or first isolated from a sample of a mineral which was recovered
from this very quarry, where were in Ytterby
near Stockholm in Sweden. But it took a very long time
to make that extraction and to purify the metal.
It's a rare Earth element, It's one of 15.
And it's actually the least abandoned of the rare Earths.
But the name "rare earth" makes you think
that it's really rare. But if you look at its occurrence
in the Earth's crust, it was a surprise to find
that actually it's twice as abundant as tin.
But that said, total production of Ytterbium is only 50 tons per year.
So it's still very little utilized, and that's probably
because its chemistry is least understood.
And it's least understood because we really aren't able
to isolate significant meant of Ytterbium in the late 1950s.
Like many other rare earth elements, it's main applications lie
in electronics industry. It's used as a dopant for phosphorus,
it's used as a dopant for ceramic capacitors,
and other electronic devices. So really niche applications,
but research is broadening these applications day on day.
The metal itself is really quite unusual because its properties change
as a function of pressure. So it's a metal, so it's a conductor.
But when you push it under extreme pressure,
say 14,000 atmospheres of pressure, it becomes a semiconductor.
And that semi conductor ability changes as a function of temperature
so it's used as a pressure sensor in extreme environments.
And in fact, one of the major applications as an electronic devices
for the monitoring sort of measurement of pressure
especially within nuclear explosions. So quite a significant element,
and quite a recent discovery.
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