Tellurium Tellurium Tellurium is a chemical element with symbol Te and atomic number 52. It is a brittle, mildly toxic, rare, silver-white metalloid. Tellurium is chemically related to selenium and sulfur. It is occasionally found in native form as elemental crystals. Tellurium is far more common in the universe as a whole than on Earth. Its extreme rarity in the Earth's crust, comparable to that of platinum, is due partly to its high atomic number, but also to its formation of a volatile hydride which caused it to be lost to space as a gas during the hot nebular formation of
Germanium becomes the allotrope "β-germanium" with the same structure as β-tin. Like silicon, gallium, bismuth, antimony, and water, germanium is one of the few substances that expands as it solidifies (i.e. freezes) from the molten state. Germanium is a semiconductor. Zone refining techniques have led to the production of crystalline germanium for semiconductors that has an impurity of only one part in 10, making it one of the purest materials ever obtained. The first metallic material discovered (in 2005) to become a superconductor in the presence of an extremely strong electromagnetic field was an alloy of germanium, uranium, and rhodium. Pure