THE IMPORTANCE OF ADVANCED RARE EARTH BASED MATERIALS TO MODERN TECHNOLOGY

The importance of advance rare earth materials to modern technology is difficult to overstate. They contribute to the sights, sounds, and odors (or lack there of ) in our daily life. Our sight is impacted by the RE phosphors in fluorescence lights and in flat panel displays. Our ears are subjected to music from ear buds and speakers made possible by RE magnets and our nose is spared abuse from pollution by RE catalysts in automotive exhaust systems. The quantity of RE materials used in an application vary from micrograms for image enhancing agents for MRI, hundreds of milligrams for ear buds, grams for disk drives, kilograms for hybrid and electric vehicles, to metric tons in wind turbines. This talk will discuss what it is about RE elements that make them so important to such a broad range of applications. Critical applications and a few that are just fun will be discussed.