Ytterbium's Physical Properties

Ytterbium is a soft, malleable and ductile chemical element that displays a bright silvery luster when in its pure form. It is a rare earth element, and it is readily attacked and dissolved by the strong mineral acids. It reacts slowly with cold water and it oxidizes slowly in air.

Ytterbium has three allotropes labeled by the Greek letters alpha, beta and gamma; their transformation temperatures are −13 °C and 795 °C. The beta allotrope exists at room temperature, and ytterbium has a face-centered cubic crystal structure. The high-temperature gamma allotrope has a body-centered cubic crystalline structure.

Normally, the beta allotrope has a metallic electrical conductivity, but ytterbium becomes a semiconductor when exposed to a pressure of about 16,000 atmospheres (1.6 GPa). Its electrical resistivity increases ten times upon compression to 39,000 atmospheres (3.9 GPa), but then drops to about 10% of its room-temperature resistivity at about 40,000 atm (4.0 GPa).

In contrast with the other rare-earth metals, which usually have antiferromagnetic and/or ferromagnetic properties at low temperatures, ytterbium is paramagnetic at any temperatures above 1.0 kelvin.
With a melting point of 824 °C and a boiling point of 1196 °C ytterbium has a smaller range of liquid temperatures than any other metal.

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