BARIUM METAL, distilled dendrites under argon sealed in a borosilicate dome

Description

S
ealed glass dome, 5 cm. in diameter and 7.5 cm tall, containing a
22.3 gram
sample of high purity
Barium metal
under an argon atmosphere.
Knowledgeable element collectors have long appreciated the difficulty of obtaining certain metallic elements in attractive forms, and no elements are more challenging in this regard than Europium, Strontium, and especially,
Barium
.
What makes these elements so difficult to present? Well, in contrast to other reactive challenges, such as the group I metals, these metals melt at temperatures too high to be processed in borosilicate glass and they are not only subject to oxidation but to nitridation as well.
Thus, the only way to prepare pure, attractive samples is to vacuum distill the metals in all-metal reactors and to package the resulting dendritic growths in an argon glovebox. And not just any argon glovebox can accomplish this job, as all common argon gloveboxes are contaminated with nitrogen which diffuse inward through the gloves from the atmosphere. This task requires a specially modified argon glovebox.
The downside is that these complicated and exacting processes are costly to perform. However, the upside is the
striking beauty of the condensed dendritic samples
which appear to look like organic structures rendered in solid metal. Naturally, the full beauty of samples such as these deserves to be preserved and presented in a manner allowing unobstructed observation such as the sealed dome that encloses this sample.