Cobalt (Co) Sputtering Targets

Cobalt is a chemical element with symbol Co and atomic number 27. Cobalt is a brittle, hard metal, resembling iron and nickel in appearance. Like nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal. Cobalt tends to exist as a mixture of two allotropes over a wide temperature range. The transformation is sluggish and accounts in part for the wide variation in reported data on physical properties of cobalt. Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was later thought by alchemists to be due to the known metal bismuth.