Caesium is a soft, silvery-golden alkali metal with a melting point of 28. 5 °C. It is the least electronegative element, with a value of 0. 79 on the Pauling scale. The radioactive isotope caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30 years and is used in medical applications, industrial gauges and hydrology.
About Caesium in brief
Caesium is a soft, silvery-golden alkali metal with a melting point of 28. 5 °C. It is the least electronegative element, with a value of 0. 79 on the Pauling scale. The radioactive isotope caesium-137 has a half-life of about 30 years and is used in medical applications, industrial gauges, and hydrology. Caesium forms alloys with the other alkali metals, gold, and mercury. It does not alloy with cobalt, iron, molybdenum, nickel, platinum, tantalum, or tungsten. It ignites spontaneously in air, and reacts with ice at low temperatures, more so than the other metals. It can be handled only under inert gas, such as argon or sodium-water. It explodes instantly upon contact with a large amount of sodium. It has a range of applications in the production of electricity, in electronics, and in chemistry. It was discovered by the German chemist Robert Bunsen and physicist Gustav Kirchhoff in 1860. Since the 1990s, the largest application of the element has been as caesiam formate for drilling fluids, but it has also been used in atomic clocks and in photoelectric cells. The golden colour comes from the decreasing frequency of light required to excite electrons of the alkalimetal metals as the group is descended. For lithium through rubidium, this frequency is in the ultraviolet, but for caesIUM it enters the blue–violet end of the spectrum. The element is highly reactive and appears yellow or yellow in the presence of air.
It also has a rather low boiling point, 641 °C, the lowest of all metals other than mercury. Its compounds burn with a blue or violet colour. Nonradioactive caesia compounds are only mildly toxic, but the pure metal’s tendency to react explosively with water means that caesio is considered a hazardous material. It cannot be handled in dry, saturated hydrocarbons such as mineral oil. It appears yellow and yellow in air; hence it appears to be pyrophoric. It reacts with water even at low temperature, more than low as low as 0.116 C. It is often less powerful than a sodium- water explosion with a similar amount of Sodium-water, because caesco-water explodes instantly on contact with sodium. The metal is mined mostly from pollucite, while the radioisotopes are extracted from waste produced by nuclear reactors. In 1967, acting on Einstein’s proof that the speed of light is the most constant dimension in the universe, the International System of Units used two specific wave counts from an emission spectrum of caesiodes to co-define the second and the metre. Since then, caesius has been widely used in highly accurate atomic clocks, and has been used to make atomic clocks. It’s a very ductile, pale metal, which darkens in the. presence of trace amounts of oxygen.
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This page is based on the article Caesium published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
