WASHINGTON (AP) -- Revisiting one of physics' most embarrassing cases of scientific misconduct, researchers from Russia and the United States announced Monday that they have created a new super-heavy element, atomic number 118.
Scientists said they smashed together calcium with the manmade element Californium to make an atom with 118 protons in its nucleus. The new element lasted for just one millisecond, but it was the heaviest element ever made and the first manmade inert gas -- the atomic family that includes helium, neon and radon.
If confirmed, the still-unnamed element would be placed beneath radon on the periodic table of elements, said Ken Moody of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, which was joined on the project by Russia's Joint Institute of Nuclear Research.
The findings were published in the journal Physical Review C. The same research team has created four other elements.
The experiment recalled an earlier attempt to create the same element.
In 1999, scientists said they created element 118, only to withdraw their claims in 2002 amid charges of falsified data and the firing of a scientist. That group of researchers included three from the team that announced Monday's discovery.
This time, Moody said, safeguards were adopted to minimize the possibility that just one scientist held critical data.
Yale University physics professor Richard Casten, an associate editor of the physics journal, said the latest work was subject to intense scrutiny "because of the sensitivity of the issue."
Casten said such new elements are not discoveries until they are confirmed by other scientists. That may take several years, Moody said.
The element was created last year in Russia using a minuscule amount of Californium provided by the Americans. After a millisecond, it decayed into element 114, then into element 112 and then split in half, Moody said.
Creating a new element "is sort of the Holy Grail of nuclear physics," said Konrad Gelbke, a scientist who was not on the team but directs the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University. "It's extremely hard to do."
Moody said the new element will not be named until it is approved by an international association of chemists. Elements 113, 114, 115, and 116 are still unnamed.
I can't believe this has been on CNN all day, and no one's posted it yet!
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Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
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But does it glow in the dark when exposed to electrons? Only about 200 more elements and we have naqudeah!
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Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
KrauserKrauser wrote:So is this a member of the supposed island of stability they've been trying to reach?
The doubly-magic numbers are thought to be 126 protons and 184 neutrons, were it is thought that nuclear shells are completely filled and thus the nucleus is particularly stable. This doubly-magic pair of numbers defines the Island. It must be noted that Uuq-288 (atomic number 114) has a half-life on the order of seconds.
Not quite there yet.
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KrauserKrauser wrote:So is this a member of the supposed island of stability they've been trying to reach?
The doubly-magic numbers are thought to be 126 protons and 184 neutrons, were it is thought that nuclear shells are completely filled and thus the nucleus is particularly stable. This doubly-magic pair of numbers defines the Island. It must be noted that Uuq-288 (atomic number 114) has a half-life on the order of seconds.
Not quite there yet.
What kind of use would there be for such a dense element like that, provided it was stable?
Most likely none, considering transuranic elements are a particular breed of pain in the ass to make in any significant quantities.
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KrauserKrauser wrote:So is this a member of the supposed island of stability they've been trying to reach?
The doubly-magic numbers are thought to be 126 protons and 184 neutrons, were it is thought that nuclear shells are completely filled and thus the nucleus is particularly stable. This doubly-magic pair of numbers defines the Island. It must be noted that Uuq-288 (atomic number 114) has a half-life on the order of seconds.
Not quite there yet.
What kind of use would there be for such a dense element like that, provided it was stable?
Depends entirely on its material properties.
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Destructionator XIII wrote:More likely pure science. If it is somewhat stable, they can do experimentation on it in a lab, learning its chemical properties, and probably it could be used to gather more knowledge about nuclear physics. 126 I think would probably be similar chemically to Samarium and Plutonium, basing that on extrapolations from the periodic table (and I might be wrong), but still, actually being able to work with it in a lab would doubtlessly provide cool information for chemists and physicists.
Chemistry is hard to do with elements that unstable, but 126 would probably be a g-block element, unlike Sm or Pu, which are f-block.
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I was under the impression that if they were to create a stable superheavy element in an experiment, they'd never know because they can only trace radioactive decay?
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Xeriar wrote:Because of lanthanide contraction (suppose it's superactinide here...)?
No, just the general pattern that the energy of the last orbital on the nth energy level having lower energy than (n+1)st level next-to-last orbital. Thus, the 5g orbital, which would become available by that point, should be filled up before 6f.
"The fool saith in his heart that there is no empty set. But if that were so, then the set of all such sets would be empty, and hence it would be the empty set." -- Wesley Salmon
Kuroneko wrote:No, just the general pattern that the energy of the last orbital on the nth energy level having lower energy than (n+1)st level next-to-last orbital. Thus, the 5g orbital, which would become available by that point, should be filled up before 6f.
Oh right, I utterly misunderstood your sentence, sorry.
This article which suggests that unbihexium would be a homologue of uranium. Given its age I suppose I should be skeptical, but I haven't found any articles discussing the potential properties of the superactinide elements after the seventies.
Xeriar wrote:This article which suggests that unbihexium would be a homologue of uranium. Given its age I suppose I should be skeptical, but I haven't found any articles discussing the potential properties of the superactinide elements after the seventies.
Perhaps. I'd expect actual chemists to know better than I, in any case. I was simply pointing out that wrapping around the periodic table to Sm/Pu on the f-block is not convincing in this case because of the presence of the g-orbital.
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