Gallium
Gallium is a soft metal in the Aluminum family. It has a low melting point, you can hold it in your had to melt it. Gallium, when painted onto glass has a silvery, shinny look and is brittle like glass. You can gut Gallium with a knife.. You can not store gallium in glass because when it hardens it expands to 3 times it's size when melted. Gallium is safe to hold in your hand and is nontoxic.
Gallium was discovered by French chemist Paul E. Lecoq de Boisbaudran through a spectroscope in 1875 in Paris. It is not found in its elemental form but found in trace amounts in zink, It is found primarily in combination with zinc and aluminum ores,
bauxite ores. It is mostly used to make alloys with low melting points alloy. Gallium is used as a doping material for semiconductors and has been used to produce solid items like transistors and light emitting diodes. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) can produce laser light directly from electricity. Large amounts of gallium trichloride (GaCl3) have been gathered to build the Gallium Neutrino Observatory , an observatory located in Italy built to study particles called neutrinos which are produced inside the sun during the process of nuclear fusion.
Gallium has been used in microwaves, high-speed switch circuits, infrared circuits, thermometers, jewelry. Gallium compounds are gallium nitride, GaN, gallium arsenide, GaAs, and indium gallium arsenide phosphide.
Gullium dust and Gallium Jewel
Gallium dust: [Left] Ammono’s first gallium nitride crystals were tiny, and metallic impurities gave them a brownish tint.
Gallium Jewel: [Right] After nearly two decades of refinement, Ammono’s growth technique now yields wondrously fine hexagonal crystals up to 2 inches across
Citation: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/the-worlds-best-gallium-nitride
LED lights
Blue LEDs in front of a white painted wall. Those use gallium nitride or indium gallium nitride as semiconductor.
Citation:
Crystals of gallium metal
The Bayan Obo mine in China
Citation:
Galena is the chief ore of lead
Citation: