Despite the anonymity, chemists know the europium dyes consist of two parts.

There are 17 rare earth metals including lutetium, cerium and europium.

There the europium stirs up its electrons, which jump to higher energy levels.

To counter that, it will also produce europium, dysprosium and neodymium.

That versatility is a bugbear for counterfeiters and makes europium a great anticounterfeiting tool.

Investors should pick companies that have high values of dysprosium, terbium, europium, neodymium and praseodymium.

It will also produce neodymium, dysprosium and europium.

It all traces back to the chemistry of europium, especially the movement of electrons within its atoms.

The advantage of QD and other europium labels is that it does not decay as radioiodides do.

The paper itself goes black, but small, randomly oriented fibers laced with europium pop out like parti-colored constellations.

But in the periodic table-wide struggle to slow it down, europium has taken a place among the most precious metals.

That wouldn't happen with isolated europium atoms, but here the bulky part of the molecule dampens the energy and dissipates it.

To prepare the ink, EU treasury chemists lace a fluorescing dye with europium ions, which latch onto one end of the dye molecules.

Its two-dimensional inorganic subnetwork, built up from chains of edge-sharing nine-coordinated europium-capped square antiprisms and carbonate moieties, is pillared by the acetylenedicarboxylate groups.

With the advent of color television in the 1960s, Mountain Pass became the world's only supplier of europium, used to produce red picture tones.

The method was able to detect low amounts of peanuts (down to approximately 2 mg peanuts kg(-1) cereal-based matrix) by using a europium-tagged antibody.