What is it?
A rare earth used in the fibre lasers that cut steel in factories, and in some of the most accurate atomic clocks ever built.
Why does it matter?
Ytterbium-doped fibre lasers displaced CO2 lasers across industrial cutting and welding in about a decade.
Deeper written sections for this material have not been published yet. Everything below is drawn straight from the source datasets and is complete.
Where it comes from in the rock
All ore minerals →These are the minerals that actually carry ytterbium. A deposit is only an orebody if one of them is concentrated enough to pay for digging it up.
Xenotime
A yttrium phosphate that also carries the heavy rare earths — dysprosium, terbium, erbium — that magnets need.
Ion-Adsorption Clay
Weathered granite where rare-earth ions cling loosely to clay surfaces. Grades are very low but the metal washes out…
Price
average, dollars per kilogram: Ytterbium oxide, 99.99% minimum
Annual averagedollars per kilogram
Basis: average, dollars per kilogram: Ytterbium oxide, 99.99% minimum. Annual averages as published in USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 · source ↗. These are reference annual averages, not a live market quote.