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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 ...
It is a silvery-metallic transition metal chemically similar to the lanthanides and has often been classified as a "rare-earth element". [8] Yttrium is almost always found in combination with lanthanide elements in rare-earth minerals and is never found in nature as a free element.
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).
It offers a huge potential source of domestic rare earth elements without the need for new mining, said Bridget Scanlon, a study author and research professor at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences.
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.
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.
The metal itself was too electropositive to be isolated by then-current smelting technology, a characteristic of rare-earth metals in general. After the development of electrochemistry by Humphry Davy five years later, the earths soon yielded the metals they contained. Ceria, as isolated in 1803, contained all of the lanthanides present in the ...
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 ...