[rumbling]
Hello 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
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 it 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.
By conducting chemical reduction from holmium oxide
it's possible to obtain pure holmium metal,
which looks like ordinary metal
and 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 though.
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 formation of holmium oxide.
The 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 is 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
or synthetic gemstones such as cubic zirconia,
which is 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,
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.
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
than 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 the magnetic field, boosting it.
Thus although holmium is rather ordinary from a chemical point of view,
it’s quite 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.
For the provided holmium for the experiments,
I found the company onyxmet.com
I'll put a link to their site in the video description.
If you would like to support the continuous production
of science videos like this one,
please support the channel on patreon.
Link in the video description.
Please like this video and subscribe to my channel
to see my new and interesting videos.
[outro music]