Overview

Holmium was discovered in 1878 by the Swiss chemists Marc Delafontaine and Jacques-Louis Soret, who saw its spectral signature, and independently by the Swede Per Teodor Cleve, who isolated it and named it. The name comes from Holmia, the Latin name for Stockholm, Cleve's home city. Holmium is a soft, silvery rare-earth metal notable for having the highest magnetic strength of any element, and it is used in the cores of powerful magnets and in certain surgical lasers. Having the greatest magnetic strength of any element, holmium is used to concentrate the fields of the strongest laboratory magnets, in solid-state lasers for medicine and industry, and as a yellow colourant in glass and cubic zirconia.

The holmium:YAG laser has become a mainstay of modern urology, precisely vaporising kidney and ureteral stones during minimally invasive procedures with a safety record that has made it a standard tool in hospitals worldwide, a distinctly practical modern legacy for an element first noticed only as a faint line in a mineral spectrum. Because of its powerful magnetic moment, holmium is also alloyed into the innermost pole pieces of the strongest steady-state laboratory magnets, briefly boosting the peak field beyond what other materials alone can sustain.