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Europium is an element which, when you excite the atoms or excite the
electrons in the atoms, gives out very nice red coloured light.
Ok, so europium is pretty much in the middle of the lanthanide series.
Perhaps its most famous use is in television screens.
In fact, most or many of the rare earths can fluoresce in this way and
give out light, but europium is particularly good at giving a very nice red
colour, and so europium salts are used in television screens, not LCD
screens like you have on the laptop, but the old-fashioned cathode ray
televisions.
So it’s very good at phosphorescence, for example, so we use it in the
tubes in TV screens to get different colours.
The screen on the inside of the screen you have dots of europium and
when the electrons from the electron beam in the cathode ray tube hit
the europium you get a very intense emission of red light which gives
you the red colour to form the colour television pictures.