Sci Tidbits: Science for everyday life: Dubnium - Element of the week from 9/14-9/20

Friday, September 21, 2012

Dubnium - Element of the week from 9/14-9/20

Dubnium is a chemical (synthetic) element that is named after the Russian town of Dubna, where it was produced originally at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research. The element was synthesized in the 1960s in both California and Dubna, but Dubna was given priority in 1997 and the name became final. Some of the names considered for the element (and proposed by the teams who synthesized it) were nielsbohrium, after Niels Bohr, and Hahnium, after Otto Hahn. You can find the properties of Dubnium here! The history of the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research here.

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In honor of one of my best friends (see above), the first element I have chosen to highlight after my long absence is... Lutetium.

Lutetium is element number 71, and the smallest of the lanthanide series. It was the last natural rare earth metal to be discovered, and is monoisotopic.

This element has a long and convoluted history, so here is a sequential list of events.

1. Gadolinite, a mineral, was discovered in a quarry near Ytterby, Sweden

2. Carl Gustaf Mosander, a Swedish chemist, separates gadolinite into three different materials - yttria, erbia, and terbia

3. By 1878, erbia and terbia switched names

4. In the same year, a Swiss chemist, Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac discovered that erbia was actually two compounds - one still named erbia and the other named ytterbia (believed to be a new element - ytterbium)

5. Scientists had problems determining the properties of ytterbium, so...

6. In 1907, a French chemist, Georges Urbain, and a German chemist, Baron Carl Auer von Welsbach, both were able to separate ytterbium into two elements

7. There were two sets of names: neoytterbium and lutecium (Urbain) and albebaranium and cassiopium (Welsbach)

8. Urbain got the credit for the discoveries, and the names changed to became ytterbium and lutetium

Whew. Another chemist, this time of British origin, named Charles James, isolated lutetium around the same time as Urbain and Welbash, and also patented a method of isolating rare earth metals, bromate fractional crystallization, that was widely used until the 1940s.

Not surprisingly, lutetium is one of the most difficult elements to prepare, as it is extremely difficult to separate from other rare earth elements. All of these factors result in a very rare and expensive pure metal, and thus there are few commercial uses for lutetium. One use of lutetium is in petroleum cracking in refineries (the process of breaking long hydrocarbons chains into small ones). The radioactive isotope, Lutetium-176, has been used in lutetium-hafnium dating of meteorites.

Good overview of element - here