| Discovery date | 1907 |
| Discovered by | Georges Urbain in Paris, France and independently by Charles James in New Hampshire, USA |
| Origin of the name | The name derives from the Romans' name for Paris, 'Lutetia'. |
| Allotropes |
|
Lu
Lutetium
71
174.967
| Group | Lanthanides | Melting point | 1663°C, 3025°F, 1936 K |
| Period | 6 | Boiling point | 3402°C, 6156°F, 3675 K |
| Block | f | Density (g cm−3) | 9.84 |
| Atomic number | 71 | Relative atomic mass | 174.967 |
| State at 20°C | Solid | Key isotopes | 175Lu |
| Electron configuration | [Xe] 4f145d16s2 | CAS number | 7439-94-3 |
| ChemSpider ID | 22371 | ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database | |
Image explanation
The image is based on the civic coat of arms for the city of Paris (Latin name ‘Lutetia’), which gives the element its name.
Appearance
A silvery-white, hard, dense metal.
Uses
Lutetium is little used outside research. One of its few commercial uses is as a catalyst for cracking hydrocarbons in oil refineries.
Biological role
Lutetium has no known biological role. It has low toxicity.
Natural abundance
In common with many other lanthanides, the main source of lutetium is the mineral monazite. It is extracted, with difficulty, by reducing the anhydrous fluoride with calcium metal.
The honour of discovering lutetium went to Georges Urbain at the Sorbonne in Paris, because he was the first to report it. The story began with the discovery of yttrium in 1794 from which several other elements – the rare earths (aka lanthanoids) – were to be separated, starting with erbium in 1843 and ending with lutetium in 1907.
Other chemists, namely Karl Auer in Germany and Charles James in the USA, were about to make the same discovery. Indeed James, who was at the University of New Hampshire, was ahead of Urbain and had extracted quite a lot of the new metal, but he delayed publishing his research. A sample of pure lutetium metal itself was not made until 1953.
| Atomic radius, non-bonded (Å) | 2.24 | Covalent radius (Å) | 1.74 |
| Electron affinity (kJ mol−1) | 32.81 |
Electronegativity (Pauling scale) |
1.0 |
|
Ionisation energies (kJ mol−1) |
1st
523.516
2nd
1341.1
3rd
2022.275
4th
4365.96
5th
6445.2
6th
-
7th
-
8th
-
|
||
| Common oxidation states | 3 | ||||
| Isotopes | Isotope | Atomic mass | Natural abundance (%) | Half life | Mode of decay |
| 175Lu | 174.941 | 97.40 | - | - | |
| 176Lu | 175.943 | 2.60 | 3.73 x 1010 y | β- | |
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β+ | ||||
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EC | ||||
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Specific heat capacity (J kg−1 K−1) |
154 | Young's modulus (GPa) | 68.6 | |||||||||||
| Shear modulus (GPa) | 27.2 | Bulk modulus (GPa) | 47.6 | |||||||||||
| Vapour pressure | ||||||||||||||
| Temperature (K) |
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| Pressure (Pa) |
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| Listen to Lutetium Podcast |
|
Transcript :
Chemistry in its element: lutetium(Promo) You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World, the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry. (End promo) Meera Senthilingham This week: an element that was worth the wait. Here's Simon Cotton: Simon Cotton All chemists have their favourite elements, often for some personal reasons. In my case, that would be iron, as I spent three years of a PhD working on iron compounds. But it could also be cobalt, because cobalt is used to make the blue colour in many of my favourite stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals. Or it could be the last of the lanthanides - lutetium. After completing my PhD, I carried out postdoctoral research trying to make new organometallic compounds of the metallic elements with electrons in their 4f subshells, known as the lanthanides. Until then, all the structures of these compounds that had been isolated contained organic rings bound side-on, or as organometallic chemists say, polyhapto-. This research was, well, challenging. The compounds did not just catch fire in air, sometimes they caught fire in the inert atmospheres of glove boxes. It took me two years but eventually I managed to make compounds of lutetium, and also ytterbium. My colleague, Alan Welch, did an X-ray diffraction study using crystals of the lutetium compound, and found that the rings were bound in a way that had not been seen in lanthanides before, end-on or monohapto-. This discovery was particularly pleasing because it was also the first four coordinate compound of any lanthanide. Mind you, what put it into perspective was that on the other side of the bench from me, an extremely talented and productive Indian chemist named Joginder Singh Ghotra made the first three coordinate compounds for yttrium and all the 14 stable lanthanides, not just lutetium. So I've got good memories of lutetium, but what does lutetium matter to other chemists? All the lanthanides took a long while to be discovered. Partly because neighbouring lanthanides tend to be very, very similar chemically, making them hard to separate. Another problem was that no one knew how many there were meant to be, as there were no theories of electronic structure or atomic number at the time. Lutetium was actually the last lanthanide to be isolated in 1907; and was simultaneously discovered by three chemists working in different parts of the world. So why was lutetium the last lanthanide to be discovered? Two reasons. As the atomic number of an element increases, its abundance decreases. Secondly elements with even atomic numbers, like ytterbium, are more abundant than elements with odd atomic numbers, such as lutetium. This is summarised in what is called the Oddo-Harkins rule, which sounds like something out of a Tolkien novel. Additionally because lutetium has a filled 4f (NB, Simon Cotton says 4d here) subshell, it is spectroscopically rather transparent and it does not form coloured compounds, and so it is quite easy to overlook. There is more than a hundred times more cerium, the most abundant lanthanide, in the earth than there is lutetium, the least abundant. This makes lutetium and its compounds rather expensive. Having said that, it is more abundant in the earth than elements like silver or gold, or the platinum metals. Lutetium is the last of its family and the smallest. In size it is much nearer to yttrium and scandium, so some versions of the Periodic Table have lutetium directly under Sc and Y, preceded by the lanthanides from lanthanum to ytterbium. The pure element is a silvery metal, and is similar to calcium and magnesium in its reactivity. Lutetium and its compounds have found some applications, the most important of these is the use of the oxide in making catalysts for cracking hydrocarbons in the petrochemical industry. But there are other more specialist uses, such as using the radioactive Lutetium-177 isotope in cancer therapy. Lutetium ions were also used to dope gadolinium gallium garnet to make magnetic bubble computer memory that was eventually replaced by modern-day hard drives. Lutetium triflate has also been found to be a very effective recyclable catalyst for organic synthesis in aqueous systems - it avoids the use of organic solvents, giving it green credentials - but because of its cost, it will never be as popular as the triflates of some other lanthanides. It's fair to say that lutetium is still an element looking for its niche in the world, but I predict that more specialist uses will be forthcoming as the twenty-first century unfolds. Meera Senthilingham So keep your eyes peeled for lutetium popping up in medicine and our industries in the future. That was Simon Cotton with the long-awatied chemistry of the lanthanide lutetium. Now, next week, we're making new elements. Andrea Sella This is not work for the lone experimenter working in a shed somewhere. These are experiments of extraordinary subtlety and complexity. And the problem is not just making the new element but also figuring out what you've got at the end. The problem is that you only make a few atoms at a time and these products tend to be spectacularly unstable so you sometimes have only a few milliseconds in which to work out what you've got. It's complex. It's expensive. And very very clever. And each new atom really is a whole new chemical world to explore. Can it be any wonder that it attracts fortune seekers? Meera Senthilingham And join University College London's Andrea Sella to find out how elements 116 and 118 were discovered, as well as which fortune seekers found them, in next week's Chemistry in its element. Until then, I'm Meera Senthilingham and thank you for listening. (Promo) Chemistry in its element is brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry and produced by thenakedscientists.com. There's more information and other episodes of Chemistry in its element on our website at chemistryworld.org/elements. (End promo)
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Visual Elements images and videos
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
© Murray Robertson 1998-2017.
Data
W. M. Haynes, ed., CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, Boca Raton, FL, 95th Edition, Internet Version 2015, accessed December 2014.
Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants, Kaye & Laby Online, 16th edition, 1995. Version 1.0 (2005), accessed December 2014.
J. S. Coursey, D. J. Schwab, J. J. Tsai, and R. A. Dragoset, Atomic Weights and Isotopic Compositions (version 4.1), 2015, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, accessed November 2016.
T. L. Cottrell, The Strengths of Chemical Bonds, Butterworth, London, 1954.
Uses and properties
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, Oxford University Press, New York, 2nd Edition, 2011.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - Office of Science Education, It’s Elemental - The Periodic Table of Elements, accessed December 2014.
Periodic Table of Videos, accessed December 2014.
Supply risk data
Derived in part from material provided by the British Geological Survey © NERC.
History text
Elements 1-112, 114, 116 and 117 © John Emsley 2012. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 © Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.
Podcasts
Produced by The Naked Scientists.
Periodic Table of Videos
Created by video journalist Brady Haran working with chemists at The University of Nottingham.
