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Material World
Element · Yb

Ytterbium

The lanthanide behind the industrial fibre laser, and one of the best clocks ever built.

Optical medium

Ytterbium doped into a glass fibre absorbs light from cheap diode sources over a broad band and re-emits it in a narrow one, with very little of the energy lost as heat. That efficiency is what made the fibre laser practical, and the fibre laser is what put multi-kilowatt cutting and welding onto ordinary factory floors.

Separately, a transition in ytterbium ions is stable enough that optical clocks built on it are among the most precise instruments ever made — precise enough that they are part of the argument for redefining the second.

Uses

Ytterbium-doped fibre lasers dominate industrial laser cutting, welding and marking, having displaced older gas lasers on efficiency, beam quality and the fact that the beam is generated in the fibre that delivers it.

Ytterbium optical lattice clocks are used in metrology, and ytterbium is also added to some stainless steels and used in portable X-ray sources that need no electrical power.

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 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 · the efficient one — a small quantum defect means less waste heat, which is what fibre and disc lasers exploit

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 Ytterbium 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

  • Ytterbium → 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
  • Ytterbium → 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
  • Ytterbium → 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