Liquid Gallium with which to play

Weird behavior: gallium is soft like a solder ingot, and after cutting off shavings with a razor knife, I find small liquid spots in the original ch unk. Even the smallest scratches with the knife have expanded into ~1mm m elted stripes. Touch the solid surface w/tip of bent paperclip. A minute later a 1mm melted patch appeared at that spot.

Was this caused by warm steel? No, the spots remained liquid for at least an hour. They finally did solidify later, but each small spot is now raise d above the original surface, as if it expanded significantly upon freezing . When I then warm the ~20g chunk in my hand, those spots melt within 30se c, but the rest remains solid. When melted, they're again at the same leve l as surrounding surface.

Apparently a very small iron percentage is decreasing the gallium melt temp by a few degrees. Not totally unexpected. But the volume change during m elt/freeze of iron-contaminated material is very odd.

And no, it doesn't seem to work as magic metal mirror-paint. At least not with new untouched microscope slides. Perhaps I'd have to torch the glass first, to bake out surface moisture.

On a sunny day (Tue, 19 Jan 2016 23:51:03 -0800 (PST)) it happened Bill Beaty wrote in :

I ws thinking about gallium-arsenide

Maybe make your own transistor?

Yea, NASA artist impressions of life on other planets will have to do for now, but they did grow a flower on the ISS. Wonder how those flowers figure 'up' in zero gravity, maybe those just go for the light. Zero gravity bees would be interesting too ;-) NASA?

Hey, is that green I spy beyond the sidewalk?

On a sunny day (20 Jan 2016 02:50:58 -0800) it happened Winfield Hill wrote in :

Yes that is a hedge in front of somebodies garden:

We had the warmest year on record here IIRC. Some plants started early, but now it was freezing for the first time. Had snow too.

very odd.

Real gallium is pretty reactive, and so gets a scum of oxide pretty rapidly . Yours might have bismuth in it, or something like that.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There's the trusty ol' Wikipedia for finding out stuff:

Gallium expands 3.1% upon solidification (don't store in a glass bottle). It also has a tendency to supercool. And it sticks to skin:

As far as coating glass is concerned, it works. Tried it decades ago. You have to rub a lot.

Ditto in the UK. Potatoes I'd missed lifting decided that spring had arrived in mid-December. They are currently 12" tall with full leaves. I wonder if they will survive through February.

You can buy GaAs wafers for maybe $50, polished and doped. George H.

Or perhaps go down to Home Depot and buy a gallon of hydrofluoric acid to etch it. Seriously. Apparently "Whink iron stain remover" is 2% HF. Don't get any inside your rubber gloves.

Or inhale it. Do you need a respirator for 2%? The boiling point is probably over 150F but still it would evaporate.