Neodymium shares its origin story with praseodymium: both emerged when Auer von Welsbach broke apart didymium, the twin, revealing that Mosander's single element had all along been a pair. Neodymium, the new twin, took the larger share and the more surprising properties, its salts a delicate pink or lilac and its magnetic behaviour extraordinary. The element has no mythological or alchemical past, being a late product of rare-earth chemistry, but it has acquired an outsized modern significance, since the powerful magnets it forms are indispensable to the compact motors and generators of contemporary technology. Its name, the new twin, keeps alive the memory of the illusory single element from which it and praseodymium were finally distinguished.
Large neodymium-glass laser arrays, most famously the 192 beams of the National Ignition Facility in California, are also central to modern fusion energy research, where banks of neodymium-doped glass amplifiers briefly concentrate more power than the entire United States grid to compress a tiny fuel pellet in the hope of igniting self-sustaining fusion. The same doped glass, at far lower power, is the workhorse material behind many industrial cutting and engraving lasers in everyday manufacturing use.