So in my seemingly endless mission to make every possible Alum I've been dissolving all my lanthanide samples in sulfuric acid. I've never really done much of anything with the f-block elements so when I saw the colors of some of their sulfates I was quite in awe of how vivid they were.
However, I use several types of lighting in my lab and I noticed the holmium sulfate solution was distinctly yellow under my broad spectrum light, but almost red under my fluorescent bulb. I thought I was going crazy at first, but I confirmed holmium sulfate is yellow under full spectrum light and reddish under cathodic light. I then found that there is a distinct color change for 3 of the other lanthanide solutions I made, although none as dramatic as holmium. Below are the 4 lanthanide solutions in question under the two types of light.
I then decided to hit them all with UV light to see what happened. Turned out that two of the colorless solutions (terbium and europium) are distinctly fluorescent under 365nm UV while the rest unfortunately are not.
Sorry if this is common knowledge. As I've mentioned I go into every project pretty much blind (after I've made myself aware of all potential hazards) so this is very new and fascinating to me. Hope at least some of you find this interesting as well!
Apoptosis
So in my seemingly endless mission to make every possible Alum I've been dissolving all my lanthanide samples in sulfuric acid. I've never really done much of anything with the f-block elements so when I saw the colors of some of their sulfates I was quite in awe of how vivid they were.
However, I use several types of lighting in my lab and I noticed the holmium sulfate solution was distinctly yellow under my broad spectrum light, but almost red under my fluorescent bulb. I thought I was going crazy at first, but I confirmed holmium sulfate is yellow under full spectrum light and reddish under cathodic light. I then found that there is a distinct color change for 3 of the other lanthanide solutions I made, although none as dramatic as holmium.
Below are the 4 lanthanide solutions in question under the two types of light.
I then decided to hit them all with UV light to see what happened. Turned out that two of the colorless solutions (terbium and europium) are distinctly fluorescent under 365nm UV while the rest unfortunately are not.
Sorry if this is common knowledge. As I've mentioned I go into every project pretty much blind (after I've made myself aware of all potential hazards) so this is very new and fascinating to me. Hope at least some of you find this interesting as well!
1 year ago | [YT] | 170