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Material World
Element · Lu

Lutetium

The last and densest lanthanide, whose crystals turn gamma rays into visible flashes.

Medicinal

Lutetium closes the lanthanide series and is the smallest, densest and least abundant of them, which makes it the most expensive to separate — its ore concentrations are low and its chemistry is very close to its neighbours'.

Its value comes from density. Lutetium-bearing crystals stop gamma rays efficiently and re-emit the energy as a brief flash of light, which is exactly what a positron emission tomography scanner needs to locate where in the body a decay happened.

Uses

Lutetium oxyorthosilicate crystals are the detector material in most modern PET scanners, chosen for stopping power and for a fast flash that lets the machine distinguish events arriving close together.

A lutetium isotope bound to a targeting molecule is also used as a therapy rather than a diagnostic, delivering radiation to tumour cells that express a particular receptor.

Medium confidence Weak evidence

How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

is used as

is produced by

  • Rare earth separation — process · a heavy rare earth; the separation is the same cascade, run longer because the differences are smaller

is found in

  • Yttrium aluminium garnet — compound · as lutetium aluminium garnet, the same structure with lutetium in the yttrium site, used where higher density is wanted

Sources

  • Material World
    Our own writing
  • Wikidata
    Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)
  • PubChem
    US National Library of Medicine · Mixed — aggregated third-party content, rights retained by depositors

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Lutetium back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

  • Lutetium → is produced by (a heavy rare earth; the separation is the same cascade, run longer because the differences are smaller) → Rare earth separation → takes as input (the principal ore of the light rare earths, carrying all of them together) → Bastnäsite
  • Lutetium → is produced by (a heavy rare earth; the separation is the same cascade, run longer because the differences are smaller) → Rare earth separation → takes as input (the other feed alongside bastnäsite, bringing thorium into the residues with it) → Monazite
  • Lutetium → is produced by (a heavy rare earth; the separation is the same cascade, run longer because the differences are smaller) → Rare earth separation → takes as input (the heavy rare earth feed, where monazite and bastnäsite bring the light ones) → Xenotime

Downstream — what it becomes