Hi everyone! Welcome back to my lab.
So, in today's video I'm gonna be producing cesium metal
in a way that is very similar
to how I produced the sodium metal;
but there are two main differences.
First, I am going to be using cesium chloride
which I have purchased rather cheaply online.
And second, instead of sodium metal as my reducing agent,
I am going to be using lithium metal.
The vapor pressure of molten lithium is lower than sodium,
so my product should be more pure.
So, let's get started.
Let's just, uh, put these two together,
Cesium chloride here,
and then, I'm gonna be putting the lithium metal in on top.
Now, cesium is more reactive than lithium,
but,
since cesium's boiling point is so low,
the cesium metal as it reacts with the lithium metal
-there's be, like, uh, equilibrium process going on-
any cesium metal that is produced will immediately vaporize off
and it'll be collected inside of my container.
So, here we go:
some lithium chunks
going in on top of the cesium metal
and, why not:
let's put a little bit more cesium in on top of that.
Alright,
I'm not really measuring it
I think, uh, lithium, in this case is going to be in excess.
But, uh, this is just a test to see if I can do it.
Let's put it all together,
put it in the furnace,
heat to 1200 degrees,
and hopefully we get some cesium.
Looks like not much has come out.
Let's try warming up the metal tube here
and see if we can get the cesium to flow;
maybe because it's a cold day, it's not coming out.
Oh dear!
Something came out. XD
Now look, it's gold colored.
That's cesium
So, it looks like most of the cesium has finished distilling over
so now what I'm going to do
is I'm going to pull this off
before too much air can get in there.
I'm going to inject some mineral oil into the bottle
just to protect the cesium
so it doesn't react with the air too vigorously.
So, I've just set the bottle on top of the furnace here
to warm it up a little bit.
Now, the cesium is liquid.
Let's pull a little bit out of there
and drop it into water, shall we?
OK.
Here's a little bit of the cesium metal
And there we go!
It's fairly reactive.
ha ha ha!!! XD
That's some tiny drops.
It reacts quickly;
it doesn't release a whole lot of energy.
But, the reaction was very fast.
Watch what happens when I drop a bit of liquid cesium out onto the concrete.
Wasn't that cool?
Let's try that again.
The cesium not only reacts with water
it also reacts with the air,
so, it's on fire by the time it even gets there,
and then it splatters, and then it's everywhere
But, like I said, the energy release is not that high, so
the reaction happens quickly, huh,
and it's over with.
Look at how beautiful this is.
It looks almost exactly like gold
except that it's a liquid.
Isn't that cool?
And, I guess, also, it ignites on contact with air.
I was amazed at how easy this was to make.
You know, I didn't even have to exclude 100 percent of the air.
A little bit of air leaking in
and it was still okay.
Now, I'm not the first YouTuber to do this,
In fact, thunderf00t has also made a video about making cesium
using a very similar method to what I did here.
I'd recommend, uh, going to check him out if you're into the science videos.
But, uh, yeah!
I'm going to take this now and I'm gonna go seal it inside of a glass tube
So that I can keep it for later.
So, here it is, the tube that I've made with the cesium.
Now, unfortunately, I didn't have any argon on hand,
so, I had to seal it along with air,
which the cesium immediately consumed.
And, so, the impurities are causing it to really stick to the glass.
But, still,
we can see the golden color of it.
and you can kinda play with it as a liquid here.
I think that is pretty neat.
So, I am going to leave you guys with some high speed shots
of me dropping the rest of this cesium into some water
And until next time, I'll see you then!