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rubidium

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Secondary Information

Definition

Rubidium is a soft, silvery-white metal. It is the lightest of all the alkali metals. Rubidium is found in very small amounts in nature, but it can be extracted from minerals such as lepidolite and pollucite.

Rubidium is used in a variety of applications, including:

  • Lighting: Rubidium is used in high-intensity discharge lamps, such as mercury vapour lamps and metal halide lamps.
  • Timekeeping: Rubidium is used in atomic clocks, which are the most accurate timekeeping devices in the world.
  • Spectroscopy: Rubidium is used in spectroscopy, which is a technique used to study the emission and absorption of light by matter.
  • Medical imaging: Rubidium is used in medical imaging, such as positron emission tomography (PET) scans.

How can the word be used?

Rubidium is used in a variety of applications, including atomic clocks, lasers, and high-temperature thermometers.

rubidium

Different forms of the word

Noun:

a soft, silvery-white metal of the alkali metal group, with atomic number 37 and chemical symbol Rb.

Etymology

The word "rubidium" comes from the Latin word "rubidus", which means "deep red".

The first recorded use of the word "rubidium" was in 1861, by German chemists Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff. They discovered rubidium by studying the spectrum of light emitted by certain minerals.

The word "rubidium" is a New Latin word, which means that it was created by scientists. It is derived from the Latin word "rubidus", which means "deep red". This is because the emission spectrum of rubidium contains two bright red lines.

Question

What does rubidium look like?