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Material World
Element · Nd

Neodymium

A rare earth that is not rare, and that made small powerful motors possible.

Neodymium-iron-boron magnets, developed in the 1980s, are the strongest permanent magnets in commercial use by a wide margin. They are why hard drive actuators, earphone drivers, cordless tool motors and electric vehicle traction motors are the size they are.

The 'rare earth' label is misleading: neodymium is more abundant in the crust than lead. What is difficult is separation — the rare earth elements are chemically near-identical, and dividing them requires hundreds of sequential extraction stages. That difficulty, not scarcity, is what concentrates their production.

Uses

Neodymium's importance is magnetic. Neodymium-iron-boron magnets are far stronger for their size than anything that preceded them, and that single fact enabled hard drive read heads, compact headphones, electric vehicle traction motors and direct-drive wind turbine generators.

A wind turbine or an electric car without rare-earth magnets is possible but heavier and less efficient. Neodymium is also used in laser crystals, where the Nd:YAG laser is a workhorse of industrial cutting and surgery, and to colour glass violet.

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

  • Alloying — application · neodymium-iron-boron, the strongest permanent magnets in commercial use
  • Permanent magnets — application · the base of the strongest commercial magnets

is produced by

  • Rare earth separation — process · a light rare earth, separated from its neighbours by countercurrent solvent extraction

is extracted from

  • Bastnäsite — mineral · the element the mine is generally opened for, though not the one it yields most of
  • Monazite — mineral · one of the two major rare earth ores, alongside bastnäsite

is an alternative to

  • Praseodymium — element · substitutes for part of the neodymium in a neodymium-iron-boron magnet; the mixed metal is cheaper than separating the two, and the magnet is barely worse for it
  • Samarium — element · in permanent magnets: samarium-cobalt is weaker than neodymium-iron-boron and holds its magnetism far better when hot, so it keeps the applications where temperature rather than strength is the constraint

is a component of

  • Neodymium magnet — alloy · 27–32% · the element the magnet is named for, and around a third of it by mass
  • Mischmetal — alloy · 10–20% · most of the remainder

is found in

  • Yttrium aluminium garnet — compound · the commonest dopant, giving the infrared laser used for cutting, welding and marking
  • Monazite — mineral · substitutes within a solid solution — an individual specimen may hold little of it

is used in

  • Smartphone — object · in the speaker, the microphone and the vibration motor, as the magnet alloy

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
  • NIST — National Institute of Standards and Technology
    United States Department of Commerce · US Government work — public information, credit requested

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Neodymium 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

  • Neodymium → is produced by (a light rare earth, separated from its neighbours by countercurrent solvent extraction) → Rare earth separation → takes as input (the principal ore of the light rare earths, carrying all of them together) → Bastnäsite
  • Neodymium → is extracted from (the element the mine is generally opened for, though not the one it yields most of) → Bastnäsite
  • Neodymium → is extracted from (one of the two major rare earth ores, alongside bastnäsite) → Monazite
  • Neodymium → is produced by (a light rare earth, separated from its neighbours by countercurrent solvent extraction) → Rare earth separation → takes as input (the other feed alongside bastnäsite, bringing thorium into the residues with it) → Monazite
  • Neodymium → is produced by (a light rare earth, separated from its neighbours by countercurrent solvent extraction) → Rare earth separation → takes as input (the heavy rare earth feed, where monazite and bastnäsite bring the light ones) → Xenotime

Downstream — what it becomes

  • Neodymium → is used in (in the speaker, the microphone and the vibration motor, as the magnet alloy) → Smartphone → is used in (and it is where four separate raw-material arguments meet — the 3TG conflict minerals, cobalt, the rare earths, and everything too dispersed to recover) → Electronics manufacture → is associated with (and the supply chain it produced is the deepest and most concentrated in the world economy) → The semiconductor era complete chain
  • Neodymium → is a component of (the element the magnet is named for, and around a third of it by mass) → Neodymium magnet → is used as (the strongest in commercial use, and the reason a motor, a hard drive and an earbud can be small) → Permanent magnets
  • Neodymium → is a component of (most of the remainder) → Mischmetal → is used as (added to molten steel to scavenge sulfur and oxygen and reshape the inclusions that remain, which improves toughness — an unglamorous use that consumes a great deal of it) → Alloying
  • Neodymium → is used as (neodymium-iron-boron, the strongest permanent magnets in commercial use) → Alloying
  • Neodymium → is used as (the base of the strongest commercial magnets) → Permanent magnets
  • Neodymium → is used in (in the speaker, the microphone and the vibration motor, as the magnet alloy) → Smartphone → is associated with (the object the whole period arrives at, and the one that put roughly sixty elements into a pocket) → The semiconductor era complete chain

These are the most distinct paths onward. Neodymium ends up in others besides.