Holmium, abundance

Holmium is the 12th most abundant of the rare-earths found in the Earths crust. Although it is the 50th most abundant element on Earth, it is one of the least abundant lanthanide metals. It is found in gadolinite and the monazite sands of South Africa and Austraha and in the beach sands of Florida and the Carolinas in the United States. Monazite sand contains about a 50% mixture of the rare-earths, but only 0.05% by weight is holmium. Today, small quantities of holmium are produced by the ion-exchange process. 

Of the remaining elements such as holmium, erbium, thulium ytterbium and lutetium it is unfortunately true that their relatively low abundance coupled with high cost has tended to preclude their use in applications outside of the laboratory. 

In the year 1886 Lecoq de Boisbaudran separated pure holmia into two earths, which he called holmia and dysprosta. He accomplished this by fractional precipitation, first with ammonium hydroxide and then with a saturated solution of potassium sulfate, and found that the constituents of impure holmium solutions precipitate in the following order terbium, dysprosium, holmium, and erbium (3, 37, 48). Lecoq de Boisbaudran never had an abundant supply of raw materials for his remarkable researches on the rare earths, and he once confided to Professor Urbain that most of his fractionations had been carried out on the marble slab of his fireplace (56). 

Even more striking in the old tooth is the abundance of rare earths (dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium) and the elements tantalum, tungsten, gold, thorium, and uranium. Rare earth minerals are found in Scandinavia (in fact, many rare earth elements were discovered there), but what were they used for Did people prepare food with them Did they somehow get into the food chain ... 

The lanthanide elements were once known as the rare earths. Lanthanides, however, are not particularly rare. Holmium, one of the less common lanthanides, is still 20 times more abundant than silver on Earth. The rare earth name comes instead from how difficult it was for early chemists to separate all of the lanthanides from one another. Because these elements add electrons to an inner shell, they all show the same face to other elements. This makes them all react very similarly with other elements, and it can be tricky to tell them apart. 

Holmium has a nucleus with 7 = 7/2 spin in a natural abundance of 100%. Each sublevel of the J = 8 ground multiplet is split into an octet by the hyperfine interaction between the (4/)10 system and the nucleus. All observed step positions are... 

The abundance of holmium in Earth s crust is estimated to be about 0.7 to 1.2 parts per million. It is less common than most other rare earth elements, but more common than iodine, silver, mercury, and gold. The most common ores of holmium are monazite and gadolinite. 

Yttrium is one of the most abundant rare earth elements and its purification is easily accomplished. Yttrium fractions from a bromate series are freed from dysprosium, holmium, and erbium by fractional precipitation with ammonia, K2OO4, or NaNC>2. The latter is probably the most effective. Yttrium salts give no absorption lines ini the viable portion of the spectrum, consequently the removal of holmium and erbium is easily observed by the direct vision spectroscope. 

It would be a preferable situation if the demand for elements that are very abundant would control the REE market. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The most wanted elements at this time are neod3unium and dysprosium (Binnemans et al. 2013). Cerium, praseodymium, and the heavy REEs holmium, gadohnium, thulium, ytterbium and lutetium are produced in excess, and are stockpiled. 

The rare earth minerals are composed of scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanides. The lanthanides comprise a group of 15 elements that include lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium. Cerium is the most abundant element in the rare earth group at 60 ppm, followed by yttrium at 33 ppm, lanthanum at 30 ppm, and neodymium at 28 ppm. Thulium and lutetium are the least abundant at 0.5 ppm. 

Besides triplet-triplet annihilation, a further process for achieving upconversion luminescence emission under continuous wave low-energy irradiation is based oti the use of lanthanide ions, most often erbium, holmium, and thulium (III) cations. In particular, a large variety of phosphors based on an inorganic host doped by lanthanide cations have been developed. The abundance of available states in these cations opens a large variety of paths for upconversion. As an example (Scheme 7.6), upconversion nanoparticles codoped with ytterbium and erbium cations exhibit a green emission due to the transitions from Hn/2 and respectively " Sn/2 excited states to the ground state as well as a red emission from the F9/2 state [10]. 

It surprises most people to learn that several of the so-called rare earth elements are not actually that rare compared to much more familiar elements. Neodymium, praseodymium, samarium, gadolinium, dysprosium, erbium, and ytterbium are all more abundant than more familiar elements like bromine, uranium, or tin. Europium, holmium, terbium, lutetium, and thulium are more abundant than iodine, silver, or mercury. Yet few people have even heard of most of the rare earths. The reason is that rare earths tend not to concentrate in large ore deposits in the way that better known metals do. Historically there have been fewer profits to be made from mining rare earth elements, and there have been fewer applications developed for them in industry. 

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