Talk:Rubidium

Untitled

Article changed over to Wikipedia:WikiProject Elements format by User:maveric149. Elementbox converted 14:26, 5 July 2005 by Femto (previous revision was that of 21:26, 1 July 2005).

Information Sources

Some of the text in this entry was rewritten from Los Alamos National Laboratory - Rubidium. Additional text was taken directly from USGS Periodic Table - Rubidium. Other information was obtained from the sources listed on the main page but was reformatted and converted into SI units.

---

The article cites the 125 micro gram per liter from the Los Alamos study. This paper shows the Concentration to be 123 micro grams per liter.

Talk

---

Would it be possible to have a sub heading which explains the dietary function or purposes of each mineral? Considering that this is the dietary section of minerals—Preceding unsigned comment added by Kwezi (talk • contribs)

Does anyone else find this part of the first paragraph a little clumsy ? "Rubidium has only one stable isotope, 85Rb, with the isotope 87Rb, which composes almost 28% of naturally occurring rubidium, being slightly radioactive with a half-life of 49 billion years" ... Perhaps a different wording, such as "Rubidium has only one stable isotope, 85Rb. Another isotope, 87Rb, composes almost 28% of naturally occurring rubidium, and is only slightly radioactive with a half-life of 49 billion years..." 174.61.254.151 (talk) 14:23, 18 May 2013 (UTC)pi@tpsea.com

Agree and tweaked, thanks. Materialscientist (talk) 21:41, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

what industrial applications does rubidium have 2600:1002:B0CE:2F32:B6D1:181F:CDF7:27CC (talk) 15:43, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Origin of name

I doubt the statement about the origin of the name Rubidium being the colour of the flame. Most references speak of red spectral lines that the discoverers observed from flame spectroscopy. One web page that I found seems to include statements from them: http://web.me.com/dtrapp/Elements/color.html

On 23 February 1861 Bunsen and Kirchhoff reported that dissolving alkalies from lepidolite from Saxony, followed by precipitation by platinic chloride and repeated washing with boiling water, revealed two new spectral lines of a magnificent violet. Additional washing revealed red, yellow and green lines not belonging to other elements. Among them we may mention two remarkable red lines... located at the extreme red end of the spectrum... (which) led us to give this element the name Rubidium and the symbol Rb from Rubidus (Latin) which, with the ancients, served to designate the deepest red.

Can someone locate something definitely authoritative as a reference? 199.247.253.43 (talk) 08:42, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

From the cited source of Bunsen:

....Unter denselben sind zwei rothe dadurch merkwürdig, daß sie noch jenseits der Frauenhofer'schen Line A oder der mit dieser zusammenfallendedn Line Kaa, also im aller äußersten Roth des Sonnenspectrums liegen. Wir schlagen daher für diese Alkalimetall, mit Beziehung auf jene besonders merkwürdige dunkelrothe Spectrallinien die Benennung Rubidium vor mit dem Symbol Rb von Rubidius, welches von den Alten für das dunkelste Roth gebraucht wurde....

--Stone (talk) 11:00, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Oh, thanks. That was a quick fix. 199.247.253.42 (talk) 04:26, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Rubidium/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Nergaal (talk) 04:34, 8 March 2011 (UTC) GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it reasonably well written?

   A. Prose quality:

   B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:

2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?

   A. References to sources:

   B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

   C. No original research:

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. Major aspects:

   B. Focused:

4. Is it neutral?

   Fair representation without bias:

5. Is it stable?

   No edit wars, etc:

6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?

   A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:

   B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail: -->

Specific comments:

• "s the second most electropositive of the non-radioactive alkali elements and melts at a temperature of 39.3 °C (102.7 °F)" - poor sentence; also say that the most elpos is Cs; I think correct is alkali metals not elements
• repetition of "Like other" - use similarly to, etc
• "and does not normally occur in living organisms" - link it better to the previous sentence
• "property could be " - may prove useful
• first para in compounds is unreferenced
• radioactive87Rb - spacing
• "Natural rubidium is radioactive with specific activity of about 670 Bq/g, enough to expose a photographic film in approximately 30 to 60 days" - super interesting but needs citation and mention at what distance
• how about non-natural isotopes?
• any idea why is there so much Rb-87?
• Who is the main producer of the element? (country)

*"m limits its production to 2 to 4 tonnes per year." - in metallic form?

• the history section is thin outside of the discovery information

  There are several points in the other sections but than we have it two times mentioned

• asubchloride - spacing
• with carbon - was it actually coal?
• " The distilled rubidium was pyrophoric and the density differed less than 0.1 g/cm3 and the melting point by less than 1 °C from the now established values" - poor prose
• "0.24 % rubidium oxide" - which one?
• why both uses and appications?

Will do the last two sections a bit later. Nergaal (talk) 04:48, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

More:

• the intro says the metal is soft twice, but the body does not say anything about that
• the ionization energy (which is very low) should probably be included in the text
• I suggest moving the first para of application to history since it fits there better if you rename the latter just applications
• "(that is, producing volumes of magnetized 3He gas, with the nuclear spins aligned toward a particular direction in space, rather than randomly)" should be moved out of the paranthesis
• " LPRO series from Datum" - wikilink? anyways, without explaining the acronym it is pretty useless to the reader
• Rubidium-82 is first discussed in the aplications section, althoug stuff like lifetime and possibly the decay pathways shoudl be in teh isotopes section
• btw, what does Rb-87 decompose to? i.e. decay pathway

  I think it is already in the isotope section.--Stone (talk) 00:15, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

• wikilink strontium-82 and probably state its lifetime or rate of transformation into Rb-82
• "this element is kept" change that to metal
• "almost always has +1 oxidation state when dissolved in water" - two points: when it does not? and the oxidation state discussion should be above, not in the precautions section
• "The ions are not particularly toxic, a 70 kg" => "The Rb+ ions are not particularly toxic as a "
• "Rubidium was tested for the influence on manic depression" - should be in the uses section not the precautions one
• "died after a few weeks" - might be nice to be a little less vague

Most of the issues I've listed are easily fixable so I will leave this review open for a few days. Nergaal (talk) 08:02, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

A few more things:

• the term Rubidium standard should probably be mentioned
• Rubidium chloride has some nice aplications - maybe borrow some?

  Borrowed only one the others are very special lab applications

• RbOH is highly corrosive
• flame test for Rb should be mentioned
• any idea what is the typical coordination number for Rb?
• File:Rubidium-oxide-unit-cell-3D-balls-B.png might be nice to use to show tetrahedral coordination

  The coordination chemistry turned out to be complex so I would not like to go into detail here.--Stone (talk) 23:26, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Nergaal (talk) 08:18, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't have sufficient time for a few days, but will take a closer look at the article after Monday. Nergaal (talk) 17:31, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

No problem! I have also a lot of other things to do.--Stone (talk) 21:51, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

• Nice work! Although a few issues are left, most of them were fixed. Therefore, I am passing this article. Nergaal (talk) 21:44, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Rubidium/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

*the use section is a mixture of possible future applications and important uses without the possibility to find the difference.

Last edited at 22:25, 30 September 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 05:01, 30 April 2016 (UTC)