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Although the Periodic Table of the Elements is an impressive achievement of human understanding, scientists still find the secrets of certain elements in its carefully arranged rows and columns.
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Promethium is one such element, and a new study by scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has successfully analyzed the chemical properties of the rare earth metal some 80 years after its discovery.
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The team used a new technique to create a pure isotope of the element, and the discovery could facilitate the conservation of this rare element while increasing our understanding of the lanthanide elements in general.
The periodic table of elements is a testament to many millennia of human exploration of the chemical world. However, no all it is known for the elements that appear in its colorful and carefully arranged rows and columns. One such element is Promethium.
Promethium, which was first discovered 80 years ago in 1945, is a lanthanide (one of a series of 15 metallic chemicals also known as rare earth metals) with atomic number 61, and many of its chemical properties remained in the eight decades following its discovery. mystery. That hasn’t stopped its use—traces of the element can be found in everything from smartphone screens to nuclear batteries—but studying it has proven difficult. This is because it is an extremely rare element that decays into other elements, meaning you can only really get promethium from fission.
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a descendant of the original laboratory that discovered the element back in 1945, implemented a new process last year that made it possible to create a pure sample of Promethium-147, an isotope of Promethium. Once this sample was combined with a ligand to form a stable complex in water, the team could finally analyze the binding properties of Promethium using X-ray spectroscopy. The results of the study have been published last week in the newspaper Nature.
“Because it has no stable isotopes, promethium was the last lanthanide discovered and the most difficult to study,” said study co-author Ilja Popovs of ORNL. said in a press statement. “Anything we would call a modern marvel of technology would contain these rare earth elements in one form or another…we are adding the missing link.”
To take a closer look at the element Promethium, the researchers first created a compound known as bispyrrolidine diglycolamide (PyDGA). When this was combined with Promethium, the resulting electronic structure of Pm-PyDGA produced a pink hue, but more importantly, it allowed the scientists to fire X-rays and measure the absorbed frequencies, leading to clues about Promethium’s chemical bonds.
Understanding promethium and its bonding properties will help ORNL produce more of the rare earth metal while improving ways to separate it from other lanthanides. That’s because the team successfully demonstrated a phenomenon known as “lanthanide contraction,” which ORNL says explains how ionic radii shrink as atomic number increases in the lanthanide series. This creates a specific chemical and electronic signature, and the ORNL scientists detected a clear “promethium signal” that will help understand the trend across other rare earth metals.
“You can’t use all these lanthanides as a mixture in modern advanced technologies because you have to separate them first,” Santa Jansone-Popova, “this is where contraction becomes very important; it essentially allows us to separate them, which is still quite a difficult task.”
So while the Periodic Table of the Elements may be a story of humanity’s chemical ingenuity, it’s also a science story still unfolding in laboratories around the world.
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