we're going to talk about yitrium
and we have some really nice
demonstrations
and a real first for periodic videos
we have a sample of a compound that has
been given to us by the person who
discovered it
so
i'm really quite excited yetrium
was
one of the elements
that was discovered in the swedish
mine in italy
so
we have reached our destination pete and
brady have been there i've never been
there but i have a rock from them
and with pete and brady's names on it
the itabee quarry or italy groover which
is actually the birthplace for four of
the elements and really the one we're
going to talk about now is this one here
atrium
part of the reason for talking about
yitrim again is that we've been given a
really nice sample of yitrium metal
by
our fan anthony lippmann who gave us
this really nice lump
and so we could do all sorts of
experiments
that we couldn't do before yitrim itself
was discovered as an oxide
or isolated an oxide in the
end of the 18th century
but it wasn't isolated as a metal
until the 1840s
it was isolated by german chemist
friedrich fuller who managed to publish
a paper in which he described
discovering metallic beryllium and
metallic yitrium in the same paper
nowadays people would write
many papers about such a discovery but
he put both of them into one paper
yitram itself
forms a whole series of salts the sort
of things you would expect
we were given a nice sample of yitrim
chloride but most of their salts are
colorless
so it was quite a challenge
to try and make a colored salt vitrium
so we filled a series of test tubes with
a solution of yitrium chloride and the
nil dropped different chemicals into
each test tube the first one
was sodium sulfide
which was a bit disappointing but
eventually produced a whitish
cloudy precipitate
then
potassium carbonate produced really
quite a nice precipitate
the one i liked best was adding chromate
solution
and
something really strange happened
as the drops went in chromate is a
yellowy orange color a precipitate
formed
which then
seemed to redissolve but as we put in
more and more chromate
we got more precipitate and eventually
a
yitrium chromate precipitate formed so
we had made
a nice
yellow salt of yitrium though the color
itself comes from the chromate part
rather than the yitra
then neil decided he would
file a bit away from the side of the
block of yitram
and he took those filings
and sprinkled them into a bunsen burner
flame
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and he got some
really bright flashes of light
as these particles of yitrium burnt in
the flame
he thought it would make a wonderful
firework and you know neil loves
fireworks
but it was almost magical
these sparks
the atrium has the
symbol y
for yankee if you like
but i read
that originally the symbol was y t
and i didn't really believe that
but then i looked in this book here
which was my father's chemistry book
from 1927
and there on the periodic table in the
book
there is the element y t
why the cell the
symbol changed i really don't know it is
one of only a few
elements that has a single letter as its
symbol
things like nitrogen oxygen and so on
so there are two applications we want to
show you the first one
is in so-called high temperature
superconductors
this is a compound of yitrium barium and
copper
with oxygen
and this material
has
a strange property that it loses all its
electrical resistance at a temperature
above the temperature of liquid nitrogen
77 kelvin so if you pour liquid nitrogen
over it it becomes super conducting
and superconductors
can act
like a mirror for a magnet
so if you put a magnet just above it
the magnet as it were sees its
reflection
and is repelled
so neil
managed to float a magnet
above a small sample of this
high temperature superconductor they
people say high temperature it's still
pretty cold but it's a much higher
temperature than most superconductors
which are only superconducting at 20
kelvin or even lower temperatures
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then
our colleagues in physics lent us a
demonstration of
high temperature superconductivity where
they had made a circular track
out of magnets
a really large number of magnets i
didn't count them and a little
wagon like a train
with two pieces of superconductor in the
bottom
and as it was cooled the
wagon levitated and you could push it
round and round
and brady and neil got really excited he
could hardly stop them playing trains
and they decided to torture me by
putting a model martin
into the wagon and the wig came off
fortunately my hair is real it's a
really nice demonstration of the
meissner effect but it's not just yet
triumph in the superconductor is it it's
yitrium
barium and copper a mixed oxide and this
mix oxide has a structure
which allows the electrons to flow
freely at low temperature the other
application
which was discovered i think by chance
is also an
oxide and it's an oxide of yitrium
indium and manganese
yitram and indium form a mixed oxide
which is white and yetrim and manganese
form
a mixed oxide
that is black
but if you make a mixture of
yitrium indium and manganese in oxide
it
forms a wonderful intense blue color
it's the first time i've seen neil get
really excited about the color of
anything
this compound which is
called colloquially yin min blue
was discovered by a chemist
at oregon state university
called mass subramaniam
and he sent me a sample
of yin min blue i heard about it on the
radio i emailed him and he sent us a
sample the reason that people have got
so excited about this compound
is that it is the first blue pigment
that has been discovered for 200 years a
pigment
is a highly intensely colored material
which you can use in paints
until
the 19th century people use the mineral
latis lazuli
which is found very rarely in
afghanistan
which is why in medieval times blue
paintings
were
so valuable and then an iron cyanide
compound prussian blue was discovered in
the 19th century
then
about nine years ago
mass
and his colleagues
found this compound
which is
pretty indestructible
neil and i tried to dissolve it in
nitric acid it wouldn't dissolve
we tried to destroy it with aluminium
powder in a sort of thermite reaction
but
finally
we managed to show if you take the damp
powder and put it
in the flame you can see the really nice
violet color
of indium you remember the indium
is called indium because it gives an
indigo flame test a sort of purply
violet flame test i found yetrium far
more interesting than i expected i hope
you will too
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[Music]
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available if you're interested
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the elements well we've done them all
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there's a playlist link on the screen
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