Holmium - THE MOST MAGNETIC METAL ON EARTH!

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Do not repeat the experiments shown in this video!
Hi everyone! Do you want to get to know what metal may soon be used for making 10 petabyte hard drives and why no MRI brain scanners can be made without it? Now you will get to know all of that. Friends, here is holmium - the most magnetic metal on earth having the highest magnetic moment among all metals and also the highest magnetic permeability at low temperatures. In the periodic table of the chemical elements holmium belongs to the lanthanides series of the periodic table which all have their unique and unusual properties. Holmium’s atomic number is 67. As many other lanthanides, holmium was discovered by a Swedish scientist and as was customary back then was named after a Swedish settlement, after Stockholm whose name in Latin is Holmia. In order to obtain pure holmium, scientists mix monazite - a mineral containing almost all rare-earth metals, with acid removing the dirt and as a result obtaining monazite concentrate - a mix of many rare-earth metals. Later on by filtering and conducting ion exchanges multiple times pure holmium oxide can be extracted which looks like yellowish or pinkish powder depending on your lighting. In LED light holmium compounds appear more yellowish whereas in fluorescent light they appear more pinkish. This effect is achieved due to the fact that holmium as well as all other lanthanides is an f block element and because of its having f electrons on the outer orbital the spectrum of absorbed light has very sharp emission bands caused by so-called “forbidden” f-f transitions within the atoms. One can extract pure metal, which looks like ordinary metal which by the way is not that cheap and 5 grams of which cost 15 dollars on eBay but you may find a better price thought, from holmium oxide by conducting chemical reduction. If you manage to buy it at a low price, it would be great if you could grind it with a grinder wheel to see the beautiful sparks of burning holmium with holmium oxide. Melting point of metallic holmium is about 1500 ℃ that is why it can only be melt in special furnaces and you will be able get such droplets of the hardened metal. Besides, you can mix a piece of holmium with sulfuric acid, the metal will react with the acid and form holmium sulfate of some colour. Why of some colour, you might wonder? Tell me please what colour is this flask now? What about now? That’s the point. By the way, the change of colour pure holmium sulfate undergoes under the influence of fluorescent and LED light is more interesting to observe than that with holmium oxide. Holmium compound are used for dying glass ore synthetic gemstones such as cubic zirconia, zirconium dioxide. Besides holmium oxide in perchloric acid solution is used for calibrating optical spectrometers thanks to its clear light waves absorption edges. Also along with chromium and thulium it’s part of yttrium-aluminum garnet which is used as medical lasers stimulated emission with the help of which prostate surgeries can be performed. Nevertheless the video isn’t over. Now we will speak about quantum physics, magnetic moments and extra-low temperatures. The thing is that at room temperatures holmium’s magnetic properties are not of much interest because it gets only slightly pulled towards a powerful neodymium magnet and even less than some other lanthanides. Nevertheless, if holmium is frozen to the temperature of less than 30 Kelvin degrees, it becomes more magnetic than any other metal on earth. That is the very reason why holmium was used in conducting recent experiments during which information was transferred onto separate atoms of holmium. Scientists managed to transfer 1 bit of information onto a single atom of holmium at the temperature of 1,2 Kelvin degrees. To put it simply a single atom of holmium maintained the received magnetic moment for long enough for the information to be read. It means that we can make 10 000 times more spacious hard drives that the ones we have today. To my mind the only disadvantage is that we will have to store such hard drives at extremely low temperatures but perhaps scientists will solve this problem too. However holmium’s magnetic properties are used even now. For instance it is used in MRI scanners which have special coolable pole components made from holmium that direct and concentrate magnetic field thus boosting it. I hope my understanding is right and if there are advanced physicists among you, please feel free to correct me. Thus although holmium is rather ordinary from a chemical point of view, it’s quiet unique from the physics point of view and has lots of incredible uses that will enable us to make several petabyte or thousands of terabytes capacity hard drives.

Видео Holmium - THE MOST MAGNETIC METAL ON EARTH! канала Thoisoi2 - Chemical Experiments!