Ruthenium is a rare transition metal belonging to the platinum group of the periodic table.
Core Principles & Analysis
Karl Ernst Klaus discovered ruthenium in 1844 at Kazan University and named it after Ruthenia, the Latin name for Russia.
It is a hard, rare platinum-group metal that resists corrosion and effectively hardens platinum and palladium alloys.
Ruthenium is used in chip resistors, in ultrathin layers inside hard-disk drives, and in the Grubbs catalysts for olefin metathesis honored by the 2005 Nobel Prize.