Creating the super-heavy
1 Dec 2011 by Evoluted New Media
The search for super-heavy elements is on – two international teams of scientists are currently in a battle to create super-heavy elements in the lab. The race to create element 119 – Ununennium – started when the nuclear physics facility at Oak Ridge National laboratory produced 20mg of Berkelium, an extremely radioactive element with a half-life of 320 days. Two research groups – a collaboration of Russian and American scientists from Dubna, and another partnership of Western European, Japanese and American scientists – were given 10mg each.
“The competition is razor-sharp. Super-heavy elements are highly unstable and very difficult to create,” said Jon Petter Omdvedt, professor of nuclear chemistry at the University of Oslo. “We are working right at the cutting edge of what is experimentally possible. In order to study the heaviest elements, we have to stretch the current technology to its utmost and even a little further.”
Researchers will bombard a Berkelium atom – which has an atomic number of 97 – with five trillion Titanium atoms per second.
“It is extremely difficult to create intense Titanium beams,” said Omdvedt. “To accomplish this, we have secrets that we will not share with others.”
The probability of a direct hit is extremely low, but less than once a month a complete atom will be created. Although it is enough to create this single atom, it’s not enough to be taken as scientific proof for the element’s existence.
“No one will gain any recognition until another laboratory manages to recreate the experiment,” Omtvedt said. “In the worst case, it may take several decades before the experiment has been verified.”
Nor is it enough for the neutrons and protons to be at the same place simultaneously – they must have been bound together for at least a few fractions of a micro-second in order to be characterised as an atomic nucleus. The larger the atomic nucleus, the harder it is for the forces among the protons and neutrons to hold it together – so scientists also want to know how an element is composed, and why some are unstable.
“One of the biggest and most exciting questions is to find out how heavy an element we are capable of creating. Even though it is extremely difficult to create elements 119 and 120, we do not believe these elements will be the end of the Periodic Table,” Omdevedt said.
