Race for the heaviest heavy metal
Chris Edwards | 17 November 2011
Nature doesn't like heavy elements. Simply piling more neutrons and protons into a nucleus does not make it more stable – it becomes more likely to simply fall apart, producing lots of radiation while it collapses. That is pretty much the reason why nuclear reactors are so efficient. The uranium they use is the only heavy element that stays around long enough to be mined. Heavier elements such as plutonium only turn up in the waste of these nuclear reactors or thanks to the efforts of scientists such as Jon Petter Omtvedt of the University of Oslo.
Omtvedt wants to create a super-heavyweight. Uranium is a lightweight at an atomic number of 92. His targets are elements 119 and 120 – they don't get names until they've been made. He and a team from Europe, Japan and the US are competing with a bunch of Russian and American scientists based at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.
Each has been given 10mg of the ultra-rare element berkelium – which can only be made in nuclear reactors. The next job is to bombard this metal with five trillion titanium atoms every second in the hope that just two will combine to make element 119. If they're lucky, they will produce one new atom a month. But they don't have long to work out whether this will work at all. Half of the berkelium will decay in less than a year. And, if element 118, is anything to go by, the atoms they produce will probably disintegrate in a few milliseconds.
Even if they succeed, they don't get to name the new element until someone else repeats what they have done and make their own tiny, short-lived sample of element 119.
"It may take several decades before the experiment has been verified.", Omtvedt says.
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