Holmium (Ho)
By: Tanyon Loose
History
Holmium is a rare earth metal discovered in 1876 by Per Theodor Cleve in Sweeden and named Holmium, after his city of birth Stockholm (In Latin Stockholm is Holmia). He discovered it when investigating a piece of yttrium with unidentified metals in it, One of these metals turned out to be Holmium.
Holmium was also discovered by Marc Delafontaine and Louis Soret, but they did not extract the element they had found until after Cleve
Atomic Composition
Properties
Uses
Holmium has very few uses due to the fact that it only has 1 useful property being its magnetivity, one of its most important uses is in medical imaging and a newly found use in surgery where holmium lasers are used to treat kidney stones and various other medical conditions
Another use is creating strong magnets and magnetic fields
One other use is in nuclear reactors to keep chain reactions under control, it can do this because it can absorb neutrons easily
It is also used in some components of Microwaves and coloring glass yellow
Other Facts
Holmium is not a very easy element to obtain, it is only found in a few types of rocks and is hard to separate from other rare earth metals. Then it has to be extracted through ion exchange.
Holmium costs $10 per gram to buy