Upconversion?! Making doped Yttrium oxide
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
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Music for this video is from the Aphex Twin Soundcloud archives
Thanks again to Indigo for the editing help and the sick guitar gifs
26:55 the ebay laser yearns to elevate your retina to a higher energy state
“Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.”
thats some styropyro shit right there!
do not gaze into the forbidden crystal
Do not look into the operational end of the device.
@OmniversalInsect
Do not submerge the device in liquid, even partially.
Most importantly, under no circumstances should you- *[bzzzpt]*
"If it gets any hotter, the vials will shatter" *shakes vial to increase reaction rate*
ngl goated plan
Nah he was taking away the heat through his fingers obviously
@@felixar90 Of course! Quenching the reaction with large convenient heat sink, it's obvious when you think about it.
i think i keep watching just because Tom always shakes, rattles and rolls things when it doesn't seem advisable -- nah it's the shed atmosphere that keeps me coming back, it makes me feel like i could do the same if i had a shed/bird sanctuary. I keep wondering if my apartment balcony is just shed-like enough to participate.
increases movement of air around the vial to increase the cooling rate above ambient its a good move
It's nearly 3:00 AM and here I am, watching my favorite Australian make glowy rocks
2am here, and same.
I quite enjoy my 5 AM glowy rock content
It was almost 3am when I started and past 3 when I stopped.
And it's an hour later and I'm watch glow rocks at 6am
Tom sweetening our dreams
The F orbitals explanation cracked me up, a s it was 1: correct, 2: a absolutely crap explanation (for a laymen) and 3: incredibly funny and exactly how we thought about them in uni.
"it's really weird in there, shit's fucked"
my inorganic chem course barely even mentioned f orbitals past “they exist, don’t forget” and “they do nothing”
@@juuuuuniper same. Which would then piss off the rare earth chemists i would try to go off and work for later xD
He somehow made it difficult to follow for me and I've worked in the chirped pulse amplification lab at University of Rochester. I love this channel so much, please never stop Tom.
Funny to me because it made some sense from a 1980 HS chem background, but was also enough to show I’ll never catch up.
Oh god, the crinkly reflective aluminium foil under the IR laser is making me so nervous
Yeah not the greatest in hindsight
@ Here's hoping the birds wore IR goggles too. Great video though!
i had the same thought when i saw that foil next to the laser :O
I cant see the problem with that, well, can't see anything else either
I'm just imagining that somewhere behind him, a plane falls out of the sky and crow eats dirt.
From now on, "Can I put something in your muffle furnace" will be my go-to pickup line.
[suspicious look]
"Is it going to catch on fire?"
@@PSUQDPICHQIEIWC Nice one. I would have gone with "Doesn't take so small samples,"
Definitely has a selection bias effect towards chemistry and chemical engineering girls - maybe materials engineering too - nothing wrong with that, probably actually more of a feature than a bug, really!
@@PSUQDPICHQIEIWC “Only if you’re doing it right.”
NTTAWWT
"Let's go somewhere dark, then we can get sad."
Fun fact: Yttrium, Erbium and Ytterbium were found and isolated from Gadolinite mineral found in a mine in Ytterby, Sweden.
Terbium too. Cant wait for Bium!
Some people toil for years to use high-energy collisions to generate a single atom that lasts for a couple dozen milliseconds so they can say they've found just one new element.
Some people just pick up a random rock outside of some Swedish mine and find four.
Yeah, if anyone wondered "why does yttrium have similar properties to those lanthanides, and a suspiciously similar name?", the key point is that chemical processes in the earth cause similar elements end up in the same rock deposits, and the naming here is a consequence of that.
Has anyone actually seen all these lanthanides IRL? 😅
@@DaēnāVanguhiyes
I believe the glycene meme was a thing because the videos were being aggressively pushed to normal users that had no interest in purchasing industrial precursors
It's not a meme... That's just how everything is on the internet now..
next: youtube advertisement for mass quantities of high purity sulphuric acid
Wouldn't be surprised if it was China's "netizens" way of sharing about the plant exploding (idk if that's what happened, just that's a common thing in China due to lack of any real safety standards) while getting around the censorship.
They advertise war planes and other weird stuff sometimes too, probably someone else's recommendations like your government spy or something
WDYM industrial precursor, it's pretty normal self-prescribed drug for biohackers 😊😊😊😊
Shout out to Otto the sausage dog.
Otto may even be alive 8 years later, as google tells me sausage dogs live for 12-16 years.
theres a likely chance this is jerma985's dog, which is also a sausage dog named otto
last i heard he's doing fine but he's old
@@kern9422 the implication that a guy selling rare earth metals over skype is also a fan of jerma's dog is really funny
@@kern9422 this is what i was thinking lmao. they are german dogs and otto is a german name but i want to believe
"Can I put something in your muffle furnace?" Well... umm... movie and dinner first?
23:20 it's so nice of you to help out medical doctors to publish papers to look good on their CV. "The novel effects of rare earth metal poisoning on the human body" is just screaming to be cited.
Crazy man from upside-down land is posting again
do you have any idea how little that narrows it down
@@manitoba-op4jx i know about 3 youtubers from there
Not so crazy. Before the advent of cell phones I made and sold a few thousand IR detectors with the same compound of rare earth elements. Pretty easy to make: A business card, a glue dot and a small pile of tiny crystals. The hard parts were teaching myself about upconversion and finding a place to buy the compounded elements. After that it was easy money.
I really love the other helpful picture. That completely transformed my understanding of the field
ah, violating the conservation of energy in a shed by a mad Aussie Physicist. The best use of 38:06 minutes I can think of!
but he's chemist?
@@jskratnyarlathotep8411 He merely plays a chemist on TV.
35:16 "Lets go somewhere dark, and then we can get sad" I don't know that I have ever been quite so seen before.
Edit: And then the bloody thing worked! That never happens, I'm starting to get concerned about your professionalism.
This is why goths love optics labs
The dark is where I always prefer to be sad.
"And somehow... that works" is my favorite type of science
to quote everyone's favorite Gary Brannan,
"and for some reason I've never been able to fathom,
/that was enough/."
So, I’ve used one of those furnaces for goldsmithing purposes, and I found that the temperature setting was off by an order of magnitude; just something to be mindful of in the future! Cheers and thanks for another great video.
Oh damn okay, might have to calibrate it with the melting point of metals or something??
@ExtractionsAndIre Yep, that was my approach precisely - or turn it all the way up if precision wasn’t a factor. Dealers choice.
@@ExtractionsAndIre You should add a good quality thermocouple reader and a few calibrated TCs to your arsenal, anyway, good sir.
Am I mistaken in thinking the crucible is made of graphite
Thermocouples with stainless probes aren’t expensive, and most current DMM’s have inputs and a display for temp. Source: my garage and CaCO3 decomposition.
Random fun fact: A lot of green laser pointers actually are upconverted IR lasers. 1064 nm IR light from an Nd:YAG laser is getting upconverted to 532 nm which is a nice green colour.
And it stays collimated?
@@enricobianchi4499Yup! The materials used for it are crystalline, single-crystal that is, so it’s fully controllable
And the Nd:YAG is itself usually pumped by a lower-wavelength IR laser diode (808 nm from memory?).
Isn't it, like, ultra-inefficient? Lasers are already not the most efficient thing, and then after upconversion you dump more than 80% of energy into heat.
@@enricobianchi4499 it stays collimated because the new re-emission process is basically the laser emission process all over again, treat it like a laser with optical pumping but EXOTIC.
So I work at a paper mill and we have a muffle furnace to do ash testing. Normally for ash testing you do it in a covered crucible with the lid just slightly cracked so it chars and doesn't ignite, then you take the lid off and crank up the heat to ash it. One time I realized plastics generally burn at a lower temp than paper so I thought I had a really smart way to estimate the plastics content of our rejects by combusting off the plastics and weighing the remaining fiber.
I set it up and go do something else. A hour or two later I come back and see most of the management team running around trying to figure where the burning smell was coming from. They thought oil or hydraulic fluid got ignited somewhere. I sheepishly stop our GM and say that I think I know what happened. Lo and behold we open the furnace and there's a nice big plastic fire in there. Somehow the lid had gotten knocked off, maybe when I was closing the door. I was banned from using the oven for anything other than ash testing finished goods after that.
The perils of trying to innovate among the old guard.
> “how will combustion make rare earth nanoparticles capable of photon upconversion?…idk!”
> made gold nanoparticles with spooky physics properties using explosions in a previous video
1:02 I know for a fact that all four scandium chemists are fuming rn
Not only the chemist but also almost all manufacturers of BAW filters for 5G.
Without Scandium all modern mobile communication would be very difficult 😅
The majority of the filters for selecting the mobile frequencies are now using AlScN a sputtered piezoelectric ceramic.
Averaging more than a video a month lately, this man cannot be stopped.
That's what happens when you finished doing a permanent head damage (PhD) degree. Can speak for experience.
I'd like to imagine he put the samples in al foil (a highly reflective substance) for the express purpose of triggering laser safety enthusiasts into commenting.
“It’s not as bad as lead.” Funnily enough, this is true for every non radioactive metal except for Beryllium so… sure!
No, thallium and cadmium are *much* worse.
Cadmium will also kill you horribly.
@@Frommerman Yeah, it's not nice either with thallium...
@@user255I think I see where you’re coming from. The issue with beryllium is however that its half life in the body is infinite. Without (a) knowing that you’ve had beryllium enter your body and then (b) getting the aid of a chelating agent (none of which are very good at it), your body becomes a time bomb of cancer even with a few micrograms of it.
I suspect mercury is also worse. I think thallium takes the cake though.
i love the little jingle when upconversion shows up, you need to do more little jingles when stuff shows up
🎶🌈🌟TAR🌟🌈🎶
💛💫🔆🟡PISS SCIENCE🟡🔆💫💛
This is so cool! Ive worked with upconverting particles as a lab tech for years! We use them as detection particles in high sensitivity lateral flow assays, kind of like the covid home test kits but more sensitive and advanced. They do require a specialized reader, but that also allows us to give a quantitative result for the amount of antigen in the sample. My PI had a little demo kit with three vials of differently doped nanoparticles, which would glow in different colours when hit with an IR laser. The method's called UCP-LF, and I used it mostly for detecting the CAA antigen produced by a parasitic worm. Never thought id see my beloved nanoparticles on E&I!
I'd love to see more UCNP LFTs. I wonder if they could be used for LFTs of whole blood?
@@lmackenzie89 we used serum, plasma or urine! But with a blood separation pad they also work with whole blood! Several tests our lab designed were intended for use with finger prick blood
Wow that is some crazy science, cool shit bro!
I want to wholeheartedly thank you all the way from Texas for your efforts to continue sharing Australian culture with the rest of the world. Other than that one Simpsons episode, Steve Irwin, and the occasional spider meme, you're basically the closest thing to an Australian educational ambassador that we'll ever see here.
Dankpods is getting up there too
There's also How to Cook That!
well american culture is ......
yes aussie culture and values are good, not as good as kiwis, but good
We got turd chemistry boys! Yes! Finally! Piss chemistry has been a theme of these experiments for years. With tar. But now, I think we've really got some fresh avenues of exploration via the humble number two. Also, as a man with two NIRS laser burn scars on his calf, a lovely 850, with a 750 partner when I was double checking the power was, in fact, in excess of what was documented and it was unsafe for use in patient populations until I'd made a teflon diffusor, you very much want to be careful with that little chappie.
"Let's go somewhere dark....and *then* we can get sad."
This channel always delivers
Shout out to Pete for being the realest.
"Let's go somewhere dark, THEN we can get sad"
He real for that one...
A colleague of mine while in uni did some work with Europium and Er doped glasses. He synthesised the oxides first, I guess by the same method, not sure in this one. However I remember that the conversion was very weak in the powder form. I would guess due to scattering. But once melted in a glass matrix they were so very bright when illuminated. I aways enjoyed helping him out with the high temp glass furnace. You just can't convey WHAT is the feeling to look into a large glass furnace. We did have just 2 ridiculously large furnaces for the glass melting step, and it was easier to use them and not worry about minutia like electric bills 😂.
These helpful pictures were very helpful for visualising the electron shielding. Great job!
• ) } -> •
I work in semiconductor, and your skills would be valued in my field. You might have to move for a job, but it will be worth it. I love it, portland or would love to have you! Good luck!
Funny you should say that, my postdoc job for the last few months has been in semiconductor fabrication! Been super fun
@@ExtractionsAndIre nice, hit me up if you do decide to move here. Arizona has a big semiconductor economy with tsmc Intel and others having absolutely huge fabs there.
Unless your postdoc job like you mentioned is a more permanent thing, if so congratulations 🎉
hey I get the draw of us institutions
but bro, there are issues with american .... many things
you may become less fun if you do this
I've got geometry too, and this video put me into an excited state.
I am spherical
The Aussie uploaded again. WOOOOOO
Gday from the other Austr* country
Hell yeah we are Austr Brothers
Austriches in law
and even better honorary kiwi neighbours
...Austr* cousins?
this channel is the best quality chemistry shit posting. I didn't even do chem at school, but i love this shit
I hope the bird's ok!
I heard it glows weakly blue-ish when hit with a strong IR laser, and it may have heavy metal poisoning
Only way to find out is to use up conversion nanoparticles to do some in vivo imaging I reckon
Phil is going to yell at you so much for using foil at a laser.
This is what I’m worried about honestly
This type of stuff used to be called a 'sol-gel' synthesis. I think citric acid is also common.
The idea is that the organic stuff transitions to a gell-like substance before igniting so any crystallisation or whatever is prevented. Things like yttrium-barium-copper oxide and stuff like that...
That’s a clever idea!
My Phd was based on Mossbauer Spectroscopy and I found your electron orbital helpful pictures perfectly reasonable and slightly hilarious lol
Every single time I think about you and "He hasn't uploaded in a bit, is he ok?", you upload within 24 hours, thank you kind man
Dude, came here checking on him and see he posted less than 24hrs.
Maybe we should get together and invoke him once a month.....
“100% pure L-glycine powder?!” Glycine, H2N-CH2-COOH, is achiral. So there is no such thing as L-glycine. 17:28
Wait, I didn't even realize that!
Aww, can't we have just a little chirality? as a treat?
@@jaredragland4707 As someone who's had to separate enantiomers with chiral shift reagent derivitizations, absolutely fucking not, lol.
Wouldn’t it be A-glycine (Ambidextrous) then? It would make a great switch-enantiomer!
The amount of helpful pictures is off the charts!!
I’m in communications engineering - had ‘how do pumped lasers actually work’ in the back of my brain for years.
Nice to see the chemistry demonstrated!
35:40 Is scrunched up tinfoil (that will reflect a beam randomly in a thousand directions) the best way of holding samples under the laser?
No, it’s awful and looking back on the footage is not pleasant. Oops. Too excited to see the results
@@ExtractionsAndIre Nah man the footage looks fine, and you're basically invincible with the googles. Just need folks to be aware that a brief reflected glint from a powerful laser can be devastating, even if you're doing your best "safety squint"
Especially with an IR laser as you won’t feel new dead spots burned into your retina.
You could argue the positive impact of your technique started a lot of safety discussion! Good conversation only in small doses though.
@@peterhemmings2929 sure if you want laser absolutely everywhere. It could be worse though if you uses a disco ball 🪩
Birb with safety glasses sitting on his shoulder, taking notes.
I have in fact considered subscribing and I am honored to announce that I subscribed.
Proceed your combusting adventures.
My specialest shed chemistry buddy 🎉
I was gonna go to bed, but i mean, okay, its only 4am.
YES! two photon absorption to highlight a key part, rather than every cell, just the part we need to see. 3:58
Yellow dye works to make skin see through, but only works on mice, since their skin is thinner. They are working on making our surface skin in areas see through. That's besides the point of more photon ABSORPTION levels, Angela Collier , did a whole talk on it, while Anton did a talk on the yellow dye.
Fellow late night dweller
I guess your yttrium is iron contaminated, so upconversion is very weak. I work a lot with luminescent oxides and can tell for sure that traces of iron are one of the biggest problems, especially in the case of aluminum compounds. Y(NO3)3 should be white and gives a transparent colorless solution. Also it is better to use a stock solutions of RE with known concentration than trying to weight such small amounts. Another thing is what your calcination step should be performed under oxidizing conditions in order to burn out all the carbon from the sample, although graphite could generate some CO and hinder the carbon oxidation. Calcination on carbon is usually performed when you need to reduce some ions in the host matrix, for example, Ce4+ to Ce3+ in Y3Al5O12
My thoughts exactly 🤔
I found the image at 1:50 to be extremely helpful in understanding the shells. The picture at 2:00 was also very helpful
@37.10 absolutely savaging the upconversion literature on brightness metric. It really is badly needed in the field though. Well worth writing a perspective or opinion paper about.
Similar things have been done for circularly polarised light brightness emitted from chiral materials. Circularly polarised brightness being defined as excitation coefficient multiple by quantum yield multiplied by strength of circularly polarised emission (g factor).
This was really cool. The material was neat, the combustion part looked amazing with the material solidifying and growing so fast, the new furnace worked well and it can be used for a lot of future stuff and the material itself turned out a really nice white powder (which I honestly didn't expect from an extractions and ire video) you did great Tom
"Let's go somewhere dark, then we can get sad" lolol, nice work man, it looked great out of the furnace!
They make muffle furnaces for combustion. But even if it isn't one designed for it, it's mostly fine. I have a thermodyne fb1315m that I use for pyrolisis of ram ICs and the ashing process produces a lot of smoke. After a couple years of it, the furnace is fine.
The furnace you got works essentially the same way as a muffle furnace but I would recommend picking up a better pid controller (it looks like it uses a standard sized one). That would allow you much better control of ramp, dwell and deramp settings (I did this with my muffle furnace and now I can control it with my phone). With better temp control, you could place a small fused quartz crucible inside the graphite one to reduce contamination.
As for the laser circuit board, it looks like the laser driver I got for a lep module. It most likely is a constant amperage power supply and the potentiometer adjusts the amperage output.
The answer I was looking for in the comments. Thank you for sharing your experience and expertise!
There are good news: No violation of conservation of energy occurs upon upconversion, because a similar thing happens, when frequency doubling in a nonlinear optical crystal takes place; e.g. making 532nm (green light) from an infrared Laser (1064nm). In this case, two infrared photons are combined into a green photon. Efficiency of the effect is close to 100% due to the bosonic statistics involved here. Upconversion fluorescence uses classical electron excitions mechanisms, paired with combining photons with any fraction of their energy.
Can’t find your laser safety goggles? Activate safety squint
Funny watching an australian work with these elements when theres a nice REE-Cu mine that also crystalizes those metals often called the Paratoo mine in Aussie. Has some fun Y, La, Ce, Er, and Yb minerals there mixing with some Cu and alkali earths in silica and carbonates. Neat deposit over there
Ive been on a kick having your videos on each night the last few weeks, great to see a new one. Your audio is so fun
You sure created som nice Turdium during the combustion part!
A "Solution Combustion Synthesis" hoodie would be pretty sick.
No better time for a manic chemistry video than 3:37 AM. Great video bro
Let me get this straight: this stuff contains 3 out of the 4 different elements that are named after the swedish village of Ytterby? (ytterbium, yttrium, terbium and erbium)
There is a legend the villagers melted down the Holy Grail, and this is all that remains.
"Who up convertin' they yttrium?"
Hell yeah another extractions&ire video, just what I need before going to bed at 2am
2:00 can’t tell if troll or forgot to put the photo in the edit lmao
100% confused lol
Bro there's a very helpful image there idk what you're talking about about
Im drunk as hell, so excited that this man had uploaded his chemistry video. I love this man so much. Watching this before I go to sleep
Thanks!
Shoutout Pete, the Friendly Neighbourhood Rare Earth Dealer.
Also shoutout Otto.
This channel wouldnt be what it is if everything went perfect. Thats one of the reasons I like this channel.
It’s 5am where I live, on a Saturday, and I somehow have found myself watching yet another video about cubane, I mean another extractions and ire video lol
Same here only it’s 4 am lol
These have been extremely helpful explanations with wonderful imagery to explain. Lovely work with those pictures they were so helpful.
If I recall well, the oxides and hydroxides of rare earths can be hard to decompose. A trick they sometimes do is boiling in thionyl chloride; and then exchange the chloride in nitric acid or whatever else you need (but it has been... 15 years? since I did any lanthanides and actinides...)
As someone with barely a layperson's understanding of chemistry, thanks Tom for making the effort to make these videos understandable and digestible to non chemists! Been watching for years and I've gained a whole world of bonus knowledge I'd never have otherwise had any chance of understanding at all.
DPSS lasers use an 808nm pump diode (which is slightly visible to the naked eye) > neodymium-doped yttrium orthovanadate crystal which lowers the frequency to output 1064nm > neodymium-doped yttrium orthovanadate which frequency doubles to 532nm.
this was basically adjacent to my grad school work and utterly delightful, thank you no notes incredible job
THIS WAS WRITTEN BEFORE YOU SAID YOU WERE DOING SOLUTION COMBUSTION SYNTHESIS WHAT THE FUCK MATE
Big fan of erbium dissolved in water. Here's something I never would have imagined, I'd be able to say about myself
17:00 I'm just waiting for his gesticulations to knock over all of his precious reaction ingredients.
I see I am not the only one that uses covid as a time reference point when trying to remember something.
So much scandium shade being thrown.
If you want to do more fun combustion syntheses, the SHS of boron carbide and titanium metal makes some very fun materials, and gets stupid hot.
Absolute treat to wake up to. Aussie shed chemistry is peak.
Yttrium, Ytterbium, and Erbium are all named for a Swedish mine in Ytterby.
Glad to see the shed getting some new equipment! What a lovely blue color on the Erbium (quite surprising). The red in the co-doped also looks great as well :)
13:50 I'm having flashbacks to my chemistry professor:
"'Clear' is whether it not you can see through a solution. 'Colorless' is when there is no color. If I see you describe something JUST COLORLESS as CLEAR I'm taking points off!"
Looks like it all went incredibly smoothly! The combustion reactions were particularly interesting to see, too.
"Let's go somewhere dark... then we can get sad"
Fascinating chemistry here! I figured that upconversion of photon wavelengths was possible but now I have actually seen it done. Great video mate and greetings from from Oklahoma US. I am an electronics hobbyist with an interest in all things high voltage and laser. Great to see a real chemistry application in materials science.
Tom, it is 5 in the morning
Perfect timing
Thanks for the helpful pictures
i get unreasonably excited when the product isnt yellow or brown
"Let's get somewhere dark, then we can get sad"
Big mood
I realise doping is a serious sciency term but I hear it & just imagine a Yttrium compounding is winning the Tour de France now
Don't blame Yttrium! It was just doing what everyone was in those days!
Holy hell, he actually bought a proper furnace for the video. We're practically getting NileRed-level production values at this point!
As I live and breathe
I absolutely love the pink colour of pure erbium compounds, always one of my fav things to see in the lab.
The burning step reminds me of the Pharaoh's Serpent reaction, or the burning step of making the YBCO superconductor.
I always love the music you play. 🤝
Thanks for making something interesting to watch 😁
This is a lot like the YBCO synthesis where you dissolve nitrate salts and citric acid and burn it.