Bismuth is a chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol Bi and atomic number 83. This heavy, brittle, white crystalline trivalent poor metal has a pink tinge and chemically resembles arsenic and antimony. Of all the metals, it is the most naturally diamagnetic, and only mercury has less thermal conductivity. Lead-free bismuth compounds are used in cosmetics and in medical procedures.

Notable characteristics

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It is a brittle metal with a pinkish hue and an iridescent tarnish. Among the heavy metals, bismuth is unusual in that its toxicity is much lower than that of its neighbors in the periodic table such as lead, thallium and antimony. Traditionally, it has also been regarded as the element with the heaviest stable isotope, but this is now known to be untrue (see below). No other metal is more naturally diamagnetic (as opposed to superdiamagnetic) than bismuth. It occurs in its native form, and has a high electrical resistance. Of any metal, it has the second lowest thermal conductivity and the highest Hall effect. When deposited in sufficiently thin layers on a substrate bismuth is a semiconductor, rather than a poor metal Semimetal-to-semiconductor transition in bismuth thin films, C. A. Hoffman, J. R. Meyer, and F. J. Bartoli, A. Di Venere, X. J. Yi, C. L. Hou, H. C. Wang, J. B. Ketterson, and G. K. Wong, Phys. Rev. B 48, 11431 (1993) . When combusted with oxygen, bismuth burns with a blue flame and its oxide forms yellow fumes.

Bismuth has long been thought to be unstable on theoretical grounds, but not until 2003 was this demonstrated when researchers at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France measured the alpha emission half-life of Bi-209 to be 1.9 × 10¹⁹ years, meaning that bismuth is very slightly radioactive, with a half-life over a billion times longer than the current estimated age of the universe. Due to this phenomenal half-life, bismuth can be treated as if it is stable and non-radioactive. Ordinary food containing typical amounts of Carbon-14 is many thousands of times more radioactive than bismuth, as are our own bodies. However, the radioactivity is of academic interest because bismuth is one of few elements whose radioactivity was suspected, and indeed theoretically predicted, before being detected in the lab.

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