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The rare-earth elements (REE), also called the rare-earth metals or rare earths, and sometimes the lanthanides or lanthanoids (although scandium and yttrium, which do not belong to this series, are usually included as rare earths), [1] are a set of 17 nearly indistinguishable lustrous silvery-white soft heavy metals. Compounds containing rare ...
Praseodymium always occurs naturally together with the other rare-earth metals. It is the sixth-most abundant rare-earth element and fourth-most abundant lanthanide, making up 9.1 parts per million of the Earth's crust, an abundance similar to that of boron. In 1841, Swedish chemist Carl Gustav Mosander extracted a rare-earth oxide residue he ...
Ferrofluid on glass, with a rare-earth magnet underneath. A rare-earth magnet is a strong permanent magnet made from alloys of rare-earth elements.Developed in the 1970s and 1980s, rare-earth magnets are the strongest type of permanent magnets made, producing significantly stronger magnetic fields than other types such as ferrite or alnico magnets.
Gadolinium is a silvery-white metal when oxidation is removed. It is a malleable and ductile rare-earth element. Gadolinium reacts with atmospheric oxygen or moisture slowly to form a black coating. Gadolinium below its Curie point of 20 °C (68 °F) is ferromagnetic, with an attraction to a magnetic field higher than that of nickel.
Neodymium is a fairly common element in the Earth's crust for being a rare-earth metal. Most rare-earth metals are less abundant. Neodymium is classified as a lithophile under the Goldschmidt classification, meaning that it is generally found combined with oxygen. Although it belongs to the rare-earth metals, neodymium is not rare at all.
The term rare-earth element or rare-earth metal is often used to include the stable group 3 elements Sc, Y, and Lu in addition to the 4f elements. [8] All lanthanide elements form trivalent cations, Ln 3+ , whose chemistry is largely determined by the ionic radius , which decreases steadily from lanthanum (La) to lutetium (Lu).
In contrast to the other rare-earth metals, which usually have antiferromagnetic and/or ferromagnetic properties at low temperatures, ytterbium is paramagnetic at temperatures above 1.0 kelvin. [14] However, the alpha allotrope is diamagnetic. [11]
Mischmetal (from German: Mischmetall – "mixed metal") is an alloy of rare-earth elements. It is also called cerium mischmetal, or rare-earth mischmetal. A typical composition includes approximately 55% cerium, 25% lanthanum, and 15~18% neodymium, with traces of other rare earth metals totaling 95% lanthanides, plus 5% iron.