Amazing Molybdenum

Neal in an undershirt is an element all in its own.

Neal is like one of those old, wise anime characters that takes off his robe when he has to meet a challenge and he's ripped, then literally picks up a car and throws it at his enemy.

I've been subbed to you guys since I started secondary school in 2008 over a decade ago! Now studying a degree in chemistry 👍

In this video: Neil and Sir Martyn sucessfully reinvent the lightbulb

Fun fact: Molybdenum is actually used in some novel enzymes in the human body. I believe we only have 4 enzymes which use it, and 3 of the four only use a single molybdenum atom. For context, we have approximately 1300 known distinct enzymes in total.

It's always a good day when Neil is impressed by something.

I'm studying electron microscopy and I recreated this experiment! I have heated wires and they have beads. I looked at them briefly and there were trioxide crystals! I'll keep everyone posted!

I love things like this. Science in its purest form, just a "huh, that's weird. I wonder what caused that" thought that leads to new discoveries.

Molybdenum at a microscopic scale looks like a combination of snowflakes and flowers. Here is hoping for molybdenum fractal art.

Beginning: Let's do a fun experiment. End: Science demands proper follow-up. Very cool equipment! Thank you!

FYI - you also annealed the moly wire as well as cleaned it of surface contaminates when you warmed it in vacuum. We used a similar setup to anneal (soften) and remove oxide from fairly thin Niobium wire, which we then used in a repurposed Al/Au wirebonder to electrically link a wafer-fabricated SQUID structure to a larger clamp interface for a sensor coil. The clamp interface and Niobium wire were superconducting at the experimental temps we were interested in (generally, less than 5mK). It ended up being an excellent platform with which to test SQUID operation and performance. In any event, if you need relatively clean and soft moly wire, or want to wirebond some IC structure using moly wire, you've re-invented the perfect way to prep it. You'll want to experiment with multiple cycles to get it truly soft (though it can't be too soft if you want it for wirebonding - it can break or get gummed up in the feed). As always, thanks for the videos!

A beautiful example of how fruitful curiosity-driven research can be. It's refreshing in today's application-obsessed research environment.

I can't get enough. You guys are so fun to watch, and It's especially great because I feel rewarded after learning something so amazing! Thank you!

Good gracious, remind me not to get into a fight with Neil. Dude is in better shape than i will ever be.

10:08 He does speak! But we mortals are unworthy to hear.

I think Neil was on his day off building a doomsday device in his Bond villain lair when he was called in to help with the video but didn't have time to change.

Wow, it's incredible what's possible these days. To get a spectrographic analysis of tiny parts of those electron microscope images... mind bending.

Wonder if changing the frequency of the electricity will effect the spacing of the blobs, look like standing waves. Like an eletrical harmonic

Unduloid. My vote for “word of the year.”

Great video! Excellent to see some genuine research being done to get to the bottom of things! A small comment regarding the thin film (9:41) seen on the inside of the vacuum chamber window after the experiment: The molybdenum wire used in the video seems to have been stored under ambient conditions (i.e. no protective N2-atmosphere), so a small but significant amount of oxygen will have chemisorbed onto, and diffused into, the molybdenum surface even before the start of the experiment. Since no effort is made to remove oxygen/oxides in the molybdenum wire (e.g. by reduction with H2), the thin film residue left on the vacuum chamber window is most likely caused by sublimation of molybdenum oxide species on the surface of the wire, and not by evaporation of molybdenum metal as is suggested in the video. At normal pressure, MoO3 already starts sublimation at temperatures of 700 C, while molybdenum metal melts (but doesn't evaporates) at temperatures as high as 2600 C. Under vacuum MoOx sublimation followed by condensation on the vacuum chamber window is still a more likely cause of thin film formation than melting and evaporation of Mo metal. To verify the cause of the thin film formation, you can apply thermal reduction in H2 to the molybdenum wire prior to its exposure to high current in vacuum, and see if the inside of the vacuum chamber still gets covered by the same thin film residue. Next video? ;)