Neodymium

Uses

Neodymium’s most transformative use is in neodymium-iron-boron magnets, the strongest type of permanent magnet made today, found in devices ranging from headphone drivers and computer hard disks to the compact, powerful motors used in electric vehicles and the generators inside modern wind turbines. Their combination of high strength and small size has made neodymium magnets essential wherever engineers need to shrink a motor or generator without losing performance.

Neodymium also plays a very different role in optics: crystals doped with neodymium atoms form the core of Nd:YAG lasers, used for industrial metal cutting and welding, in some medical and dental treatments, and across a range of scientific and research applications. Neodymium compounds are additionally used to tint glass, producing shades that shift attractively under different types of light.

History

Neodymium was discovered in 1885 by Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach, in the same experiment that also revealed praseodymium. Both elements had been hiding inside a substance called didymium, which chemists had mistaken for a single element for roughly forty years before von Welsbach used careful, repeated chemical separation to prove it was actually two. He named this second new element neodymium, from Greek words meaning “new twin,” and while it attracted little practical attention at first, it went on to become one of the most technologically important rare-earth elements once its role in powerful permanent magnets was developed in the twentieth century.