Group 4 Element

Group 4 is the second group of transition metals in the periodic table. It contains the four elements titanium (Ti), zirconium (Zr), hafnium (Hf), and rutherfordium (Rf). The group is also called the titanium group or titanium family after its lightest member.

As is typical for early transition metals, zirconium and hafnium have only the group oxidation state of +4 as a major one, and are quite electropositive and have a less rich coordination chemistry. Due to the effects of the lanthanide contraction, they are very similar in properties. Titanium is somewhat distinct due to its smaller size: it has a well-defined +3 state as well (although +4 is more stable).

All the group 4 elements are hard, refractory metals. Their inherent reactivity is completely masked due to the formation of a dense oxide layer that protects them from corrosion, as well as attack by many acids and alkalis. The first three of them occur naturally. Rutherfordium is strongly radioactive: it does not occur naturally and must be produced by artificial synthesis, but its observed and theoretically predicted properties are consistent with it being a heavier homologue of hafnium. None of them have any biological role.

History

Zircon was known as a gemstone from ancient times, but it was not known to contain a new element until the work of German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789. He analysed the zircon-containing mineral jargoon and found a new earth (oxide), but was unable to isolate the element from its oxide. Cornish chemist Humphry Davy also attempted to isolate this new element in 1808 through electrolysis, but failed: he gave it the name zirconium. In 1824, Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius isolated an impure form of zirconium, obtained by heating a mixture of potassium and potassium zirconium fluoride in an iron tube.

Cornish mineralogist William Gregor first identified titanium in ilmenite sand beside a stream in Cornwall, Great Britain in the year 1791. After analyzing the sand, he determined the weakly magnetic sand to contain iron oxide and a metal oxide that he could not identify. During that same year, mineralogist Franz Joseph Muller produced the same metal oxide and could not identify it. In 1795, chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth independently rediscovered the metal oxide in rutile from the Hungarian village Boinik. He identified the oxide containing a new element and named it for the Titans of Greek mythology. Berzelius was also the first to prepare titanium metal (albeit impurely), doing so in 1825.Greenwood and Earnshaw, p. 954

The X-ray spectroscopy done by Henry Moseley in 1914 showed a direct dependency between spectral line and effective nuclear charge. This led to the nuclear charge, or atomic number of an element, being used to ascertain its place within the periodic table. With this method, Moseley determined the number of lanthanides and showed that there was a missing element with atomic number 72. This spurred chemists to look for it. Georges Urbain asserted that he found element 72 in the rare earth elements in 1907 and published his results on ''celtium'' in 1911. Neither the spectra nor the chemical behavior he claimed matched with the element found later, and therefore his claim was turned down after a long-standing controversy.

By early 1923, several physicists and chemists such as Niels Bohr and Charles Rugeley Bury suggested that element 72 should resemble zirconium and therefore was not part of the rare earth elements group. These suggestions were based on Bohr's theories of the atom, the X-ray spectroscopy of Moseley, and the chemical arguments of Friedrich Paneth. Encouraged by this, and by the reappearance in 1922 of Urbain's claims that element 72 was a rare earth element discovered in 1911, Dirk Coster and Georg von Hevesy were motivated to search for the new element in zirconium ores. Hafnium was discovered by the two in 1923 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The place where the discovery took place led to the element being named for the Latin name for "Copenhagen", ''Hafnia'', the home town of Niels Bohr.

Hafnium was separated from zirconium through repeated recrystallization of the double ammonium or potassium fluorides by Valdemar Thal Jantzen and von Hevesy. Anton Eduard van Arkel and Jan Hendrik de Boer were the first to prepare metallic hafnium by passing hafnium tetraiodide vapor over a heated tungsten filament in 1924. The long delay between the discovery of the lightest two group 4 elements and that of hafnium was partly due to the rarity of hafnium, and partly due to the extreme similarity of zirconium and hafnium, so that all previous samples of zirconium had in reality been contaminated with hafnium without anyone knowing.

The last element of the group, rutherfordium, does not occur naturally and had to be made by synthesis. The first reported detection was by a team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), which in 1964 claimed to have produced the new element by bombarding a plutonium-242 target with