Samples of ytterbium
6 December 2024
Ytterbium is a chemical element with atomic number 70 and the symbol Yb. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal that is yellow or golden in color. It has a few specialized uses: its radioactive isotopes are used as sources of gamma rays and in atomic clocks; it is sometimes used to improve the physical properties of stainless-steel alloys; and it is used as the trapped-ion qubit in quantum computing.
It is one of four elements named for their original source mine in Ytterby, Sweden, the others being yttrium, terbium, and erbium. It was discovered by chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac in a sample of gadolinite in 1878. Marignac dubbed it ytterbine (ytterbium in English):
L’autre est une base nouvelle, appartenant au même groupe, et pour laquelle je propose le nom d’ytterbine, qui rappellera sa présence dans le minéral d’Ytterby, et ses analogies avec l’yttria, d’un côte, par son absence de coloration, avec l’erbine, de l’autre.
(The other is a new base, belonging to the same group, and for which I propose the name ytterbium, which will recall its presence in the mineral from Ytterby, and its analogies with yttria, on the one hand, by its absence of coloration, with erbine, on the other.)
In 1907, Georges Urbain separated Marignac’s sample into two elements, Marignac’s ytterbium, which he dubbed neoytterbium, and lutetium, While the latter name was generally accepted, the name neoytterbium eventually went by the wayside, and by the 1920s ytterbium was again the generally used name for the element.
Sources:
de Marignac, Jean Charles Galissard. “Sur l’ytterbine, nouvelle terre continue dans la gadolinite.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences, 88.17, 22 October 1878, 578–81 at 579–80. Bibliothéque Nationale de France: Gallica.
Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ytterbium, n.
Photo credit: W. Oelen, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.