Good afternoon.  Thanks a lot for your attention. 
My name is Stephen Boyd.
I am an entrepreneur; I am a fluorine chemist.
Most of my PhD work was
actually on rare earth doped fluoride salts.
That's actually what I'm going to be talking about.
they were discovered as early as 1803
and they're not actually
that rare in the earth's crust.
the reason why rarity was attached to it,
is because
as Bradley had indicated in his talk
they're rather diffuse
in terms of their prevalence
in the earth's crust around the planet.
Placer deposits,
they're minor.  Monazite leg veins and Churchite veins
are actually the major sources
of the rare earth elements.
Monazite is highlighted here because of the
co-prevalence of thorium
that co-occur with other rare earth elements.
Churchite veins
are more dispersed
they were found actually - originally in the
 Achavaltzvald(SP) region of Germany,
but there are several very concentrated
locations around the planet, most
prevalent in Mt. Weld(SP?) in western Australia. 
They're basically grouped
by "lights" and "heavies"
Churchite is actually a general name for the mineral,
where you have lots of different types of rare-earth elements,
mostly the lanthanides,
which actually occurred quite specifically - and again they are
phosphates.
They are phosphates - very similar to monazite.
They were actually really difficult to isolate.
They have extremely high melting points - their oxides -
and the medals the base
metals themselves when reduced have very high melting points. 
Those were two
contributing factors actually made
their isolation and characterization very difficult.
And so, one of the major
advances to get them out in much larger quantities
as actually developed in the
1940s by a Canadian - I know we have
a nice Canadian presence here - a
guy by the name of Frank Speadding
and he developed the ion-exchange matrix.
This is a crystal structure
of one of the first clays
that was actually used in order to perform ion exchange,
called montmorillonite.
These are actually atomic positions
inside the crystal.
What makes this so interesting,
is that the aluminum and
in both these positions represented
by the purple and red spheres here
are both +3.
They're both +3 oxidation states
and they can easily move in and out.
That's a hint. All of the rare earth's are
 in a +3 oxidation state when they're oxidized.
And, that's what worked
to such a huge advantage
actually for the allies in the 1940s
and then subsequently in the
1950s and 1960s,
and I'll get back to the reasons why
it became even more important,
as the nuclear age came into its own.
How do we identify these things?
How do we do it?  We use x-rays.
But, they're powders?
That's okay.
Because look what happens.
If you shine a series of x-rays,
and you move an x-ray
ever little so slightly, ever a little bit,
you end up hitting these planes.
When you hit these planes
something special occurs.
You get reflections,
you get very intense reflection peaks.
That's how we identify what crystals
we're working with - phosphates, oxides,
nitrates - that's how it works.
And, each one has its own fingerprint,
and it is based explicitly on
taking x-rays and
beating the heck out of your sample with some x-rays
like I did at the National Light Source
at Brookhaven National Labs, and that's how it works.
  It follows along these crystallographic planes,
these tetrahedra and octahedra.
And, when you hit it
you get an intensity -
and you notice,
well this is actually
a poor representation,
it's actually represented in 2-theta,
two times the angle.
What happens regardless of the nuclear process? 
You get a lot of fission products.
We know what those fission products are.
There's the so-called rare earths.
Chemists and Physicists
got hold of these things,
because it was the first time they were
able to simultaneously isolate them,
and have the financial wherewithal
and the equipment to be able to dope them -
to be able to put them inside
very simple crystal structures,
and then analyze what made
these lanthanides and actinides so special.
This was play-land for chemists
and physicists in the 1950s,
1960s, and even into the 1970s
and I actually met some of the
original scientists who did this.
They litterally would take
a hot samarium or a hot erbium,
literally dope it into a crystal, grow the crystal,
and then the experiments they were running
were called electron spin resonance.
They would literally put an erbium or a terbium or ytterbium
right into the center of a
very simple crystal structure.
The structure which they already knew - like i said with x-ray,
and then they would look and they would excite it very
precisely and see what would come off,
and they would do it
because of the electron spin.
You may ask, why is this so important?
Why are the rare earths separate from the rest of the periodic table?
It's because of their electron configuration.
This is probably the best periodic table I think I've ever seen as a
chemist.  Why -
because it groups
the elements, all the elements in terms of the periodic table - it
groups them by
how we as chemists and physicists count
the electrons
they are dominated by the s orbitals over on the left,
the d orbitals in this broad structure in the middle,
the p orbitals over on the right,
and this is why the lanthanides and actinides are so important,
is because they had f-orbital electrons,
and that is what brought modern electronics
into the golden age, which we are in right now.
Here are the rare earths we have the lanthanide series
 - we have the light rare earths.
I'm going to talk exclusively
about the 14 rare earths in the lanthanide series,
and to a lesser degree in the actinide series.
we have the s orbitals, we have
3 p's,
we have 5 d's,
and we have 7 f's
and exactly two electrons only,
can fit in each orbital.
2 times 7 is 14.
There's your fourteen.
If you recall,
2 orbitals times 5 - it's ten.
That's the trick.
There's a second trick.
The aufbau principle - yes that's
shameless self promotion,
my company is called Aufbau Laboratories.
There is a very specific way in which the electrons add,
element to element to element
as you go up in the periodic table.
They add one electron at a time in each those orbitals
that I just showed you.
Up, up, up, up, up,
up, up.  Okay?
And, there's 7 of them.
So, if you if you look at the periodic table again -
look at number 7 -
right the middle, gadolinium.
it means that
every single one of these
7 orbitals has exactly one electron in it
and they're all pointing up,
and thats a hint.  I'm going to
allude back to that just a minute.
This is how they add,
and let's watch - it's just simple counting.  
[reading slide left to right and down]
1, 2, 2p, 3s, 3p, 3d, 4s, 4p,
4d, 4f
5s,
5p, 5d...
And, look at the arrows so it's 1s, 2s, 2p, 3s,
3p, 4s,
3d, 4p, 5s,
4d,
5p, 6s. Oh look - it goes back to 4.
Well, everybody that 4 is less than than 5.
Okay.
That's another hint.
What is so special about those f electrons?
Well I think I just pointed out
5 is bigger than 4, right?
So look what
happens
when you excite one of those f electrons.
It goes up into a higher energy -
into the 5d,
but the second that it gets up there
it kinda doesn't like it
and so it drops back down.
But, you can do that all day long.
What makes this more interesting?
What did I say?  The 4f energy is actually
more numerous but lower in energy.
If anybody has taken
art classes,
historically -
all the colors that we see in Monet, Mannet
Piecavo(SP),
they were all made with colors right here. Why? 
Because, we can see those colors.
So what did we discover in the golden age of atomics
as they were moving forward,
we figured out that it took
relatively low energies
to excite those electrons into those
empty d-orbitals and boom, drop them
right back down into the f's
cause that's where all those f-electrons are
Very interesting.
What does that allow us to do?
It allows me to make this laser.
I excite the electron up,
because I know I'm tuning my crystal, because I know
what elements I'm going to be doping in,
so I can tune my energies
and I can make
red laser light.
If I go a little bit higher
I can make green laser light,
if I go a little bit higher I can make blue laser light.
Because, I now know what those relative energies are,
and they're all
or almost exclusively, they're all in the
UV-visible band.
That is really important for us.  Why?  Because,
every single one of us has a cell phone in here.
And, we need to communicate that light,
that electromagnetic radiation
very specifically
and very reproducibly.
And so, that's why they are in satellite guidance systems,
our cell phones and our computers.
Because in addition to visible light,
were trying to very precisely control
electromagnetic radiation - stuff that we
can't see, but it's nevertheless light -
same stuff.
And, that's what makes these things so special.
If you recall back to high school chemistry and physics,
look at where these wavelengths are:
425 nm - 325 nm.  This is in the is in the
violet/UV and and 425 nm you're pushing right into blue-green.
These are very useful colors for us.
Note too the wavelength distribution is actually narrow,
and we can tune that further and furtherr and further,
so that we can in fact get neodymium doped lasers.
Electrons are adding
spin-up, spin-up, spin-up, one-electron, one-electron per orbital
and they are all pointing in one direction -
that's how magnets work.
That's why if you ever take a kitchen magnet and you break it,
it's still got a north and south
because you haven't changed the direction of the elections,
they're still all pointing up.
That's how magnets work -
and when you
have - per mole, or per gram
a lot of these,
that work well with other what are called
other high-spin metals like iron,
like cobalt, you have
fabulous punch - you've got a lot of magnet in a very small size.
And, this is an excellent article that was published in 2009
in the journal of magnetisim and magnetic materials,
so you've got terbium,
you've got gallium and you've got iron in there.  You have
fabulously - and look at the layers.
Light,
is basically electric field and a magnetic field at right angles to one
another.
You can control this.
That's pretty interesting.
You can control this, you can flip the spin,
you can temporarily change that
magnetic field from one way to the other.
That's what makes
lanthanides so special, and rare earths in general so special and so
strategic,
because you're controlling a satellite
hundreds of miles away
in the vacuum of of space-time.  You're sitting comfortably in
front of your laptop in your lab, you can't be up there.
But, you have the ability to control these things
from very far distances.  Why?
You're using electromagnetic radiation.
That's how you're sending and
receiving these signals, and that's why
the applications of rare earth elements,
they are so important they're so
ubiquitous, and they're so important to our future.
not only for
the United States - not only for americans future
strategy - but for world future strategy.
This is just a partial list of the applications that I found:
Automobile catalytic converters, ceramics,
fluid catalytic cracking,
glass additives,
metallurgy - except for batteries,
neodymium magnets, battery alloys.
Phosphors - you hit it with a little bit
of energy and out pops a photon
of a different energy - the one you want,
because you hit it with a known energy
coming in.
Percentage of total RE used:
This is in metric tons -
we use a lot of this stuff,
as we continue to advance with LCD screens
and now with Phillips coming out
with flexible LCDs and LED screens,
you nevertheless have rare earths
at both ends of that circuit.
Look at this usage.
I mean, this is almost perfectly linear,
and again it's in thousands of metric tons.
We're tight on time - I want you guys to take home -
rare earths are
separate from the rest of the periodic table
because of their f-electrons.
Their rare earth value stems from their
tunable photonic and magnetic properties
that we as scientists -
me as a chemist and physicists
who mess around with condensed matter physics
and solid state chemistry just like we do
we can tune those properties.
Rare earth value stems from the high
magnetic susceptibilities and that these
properties are tunable
in the magnetic field.
I have just scratched the surface as to these applications.
We have spin-ICEs[SP?] we have institute for
quantum computing in Waterloo, Canada -
which is working on spin-ICEs
I actually submitted something on erbium titanate
where you can actually
control the spin on this thing.
You can control the quantum
angular momentum of this thing,
and watch it bounce around
a crystallographic lattice.
And, it's going to be used
in the next 10-15 years to build
the world's first quantum computer.
That's amazing.
I hope you guys understand now
a little bit more about rare earth elements
and what the future holds
for these unbelievable materials and elements.
