Don’t own any europium yet? Sure you do. Pick up your phone and bring up a page with a lot of red in it. You can thank europium for that. An injection of a few trillion atoms of europium on each and every one of those tiny pixels turns it bright red. Without this element’s contribution to modern tech, the best alternative scientists may come up with would look washed out and weak by comparison. Even more promising, research teams have recently developed new europium-doped compounds capable of yielding better greens and blues, too.

Europium is the most reactive of the rare earth elements as it is easily attacked by the abundance of oxygen in our atmosphere. Even the minutest traces of this gas sneaking into a laboratory glovebox is sufficient to visibly dull the metal. It’s easy enough to turn what is basically a fish tank with a couple of holes into a work environment where pure argon gas is piped in. The problem is that as you pump out the mixture of air with the oxygen that you’re so desperately trying to get rid of, errant O2 still manages to get in. Getting down to 10 parts per million oxygen and/or water vapor in your working chamber is child’s play. Sadly, at this level your once-shiny europium metal sample will still turn so dark that you’ll have difficulty identifying it as a metal. Getting that glove box to reliably reduce the amount of oxygen and water vapor down to the 0.1 part in a million range is a far more difficult challenge. The seals have to be scrupulously cleaned, the argon source has to be specially prepared, the gas purging pump has to be frequently serviced and the most fantastically tedious steps need to be taken to ensure that the rubbery glove material itself doesn’t itself outgas oxygen.

The europium metal samples prepared for Luciteria benefit from a top-tier govebox design and our lab uses the same fussy regimen to limit oxygen intrusion down to the 0.1ppm goal. However, that is, unfortunately, still a level that admits enough oxygen to prevent this particular metal from remaining as shiny as a fresh minted penny. Preservation at that level would require systems that perhaps only NASA could afford… with the consequent bill for gem-shiny specimens unaffordable to any but government agencies! Still, even with these considerations in mind the level of luster preserved is exceptional and easily bests what large chemical firms like Alfa Aesar can provide.