Now ytterbium sounds so cool, doesn’t it? Damn near useless but with a name like that we’ll cut it slack. Sure, it’s used for engraving lasers (that’s the machine responsible for the print on our density cubes) but besides that and a handful of other, even more obscure uses, all ytterbium is good for is making your collection good. It is a good looker, no doubt about it.

Yellow and twisty, ytterbium is a soft rare earth metal that normally comes in a super-refined 99.95% dendritic grade. The somewhat lower graded ingot-cast type usually offered for the other lanthanides is either not carried by the Chinese refiners that purify these metals or is offered at no discount so that labs will gravitate to the always-preferred dendritic. These dendrites lend ytterbium, as the rest of the REEs, a fibrous nature that can usually be pried apart by hand when the crystals are small. In the samples included in these ampules they are instead machine chopped to fit inside the glass.