Stworzą pierwiastek 120

These Scientists Want to Create the Heaviest Atom. They Already Have Their First Success

Remember the periodic table of elements from chemistry class? Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may force us to replace our textbooks and Medeleev tables from schools. The new version will be enriched with an 8th row and the heaviest atom ever created.

At the outset it is worth emphasizing that this team are not amateurs. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are credited with discovering 16 of the 118 known elements. It has just been announced that they have managed to create (the already familiar) superheavy element 116, called Livermorium, using a titanium beam. But this feat is just the first step towards the colleague with number 120.

We’ll wait a little longer

The result was presented at the Nuclear Structure 2024 conference and on the Berkeley Lab website. So far, Using the new method, the team created two atoms of element 116 during 22 days of work in the laboratory’s heavy ion acceleratoror 88-inch cyclotron. Creating an atom of element 120 would be even rarer. Judging by the rate at which Livermorium was produced, this is a reaction that scientists can look for for… several years.

We needed nature to be kind and nature was kind. We think it will take about 10 times longer to find 120 than 116. It’s not easy, but now it seems doable

said Reiner Kruecken, director of Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division

However, if scientists succeed in their goal, they would discover the heaviest atom created, which would be in the eighth row of the periodic table. Until now, atoms of this order have existed only in theory, which is why they were not usually placed on the periodic table. Interestingly, as Berkeley Lab emphasizes in its press release, the number 120 is located on the edge of the “island of stability,” a theoretical group of superheavy elements with unique properties. It differs from the superheavy elements discovered so far in that it has a more stable nucleus that will not immediately decay.

How are new elements created?

In theory, this is a trivial process. It would be enough to break together two lighter elements that, when combined, have the right number of protons in the final atom. In practice, however, this translates into an innumerable number of interactions and limitations of such processes. Hence It is extremely important to select the appropriate variables for this equation.

The experts at the 88-inch cyclotron decided to see if they could produce a sufficiently intense beam of the isotope titanium-50 over a period of several weeks and use it to produce element 116, the heaviest element ever produced at Berkeley Lab. That’s important because until now, elements 114 through 118 have only been produced using a beam of calcium-48, which has a special configuration of neutrons and protons that helps it combine with target nuclei to produce superheavy elements. The titanium beam is not like that, so it was wondered whether it was possible to use it at all. However, experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of this method, which translates into a step towards number 120.

How element 120 was created

So far, it has been possible to produce compound nuclei with 120 protons, but attempts to synthesize the isotope of the element itself, which is currently called Unbinil, have so far failed.

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