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| What is Germanium |
Germanium is a chemical element that has the symbol Ge and atomic number 32 in the periodic table. Germanium is a hard, grey-white element with properties between Silicon and tin, and the same crystal structure as diamond.
Germanium has a metallic appearance but exhibits the physical and chemical properties of a metal only under special conditions since it is located in the periodic table where the transition from nonmetal to metal occurs. At room temperature, it behaves like a brittle material.
Germanium is distributed in the Earth’s crust in an abundance of 6.7 parts per million. It is found in sulphide ores of copper, zinc, lead, tin and antimony. |
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| Why is it named after Germany? |
In 1885 a new ore, argyrodite, was discovered in the mines at Freiberg, Germany. Clemens Winkler, then a renowned chemist in that part of the country, was asked to examine it and to his surprise the results of his analysis consistently came out too low. One year later in 1886, Winkler discovered that this was due to the presence of a new element, which after several months’ search, he isolated and named Germanium after his fatherland (Latin Germania for Germany). The properties of Germanium matched those of the missing analogue of the Silicon group whose existence had been predicted back in 1871 by Dmitri Mendeleev, and thus confirmed Mendeleev’s idea of element periodicity.
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| Importance of Germanium in infra-red applications |
Germanium has a small band gap allowing it to efficiently respond to the infra-red region of the spectrum. Germanium’s high refractive index of 4.0 makes it a very useful imaging component of IR systems operating in the 2 – 12µm range.
Germanium crystals are currently used in thermal-infrared and monitor cameras, pyrometry, automotive sensors, high-performance solar cells, medicine, night-vision equipment, and for high-performance lasers.
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