Scientists want to know where the periodic table ends. PeriodicTableDay
At the far edge of the periodic table, elements decay within instants of their formation, offering very little time to study their properties. In fact, scientists still know little about the latest crew of newfound elements. So while some scientists are hunting for never-before-seen elements, others want to learn more about the table’s newcomers and the strange behaviors those superheavy elements may exhibit.
Driving all this effort is a deep curiosity about how elements act at the boundaries of the periodic table. “This might sound corny, but it’s really just [about] pure scientific understanding,” says nuclear chemist Dawn Shaughnessy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “We have these things that are really at the extremes of matter and we don’t understand right now how they behave.”Read our ongoing coverage of this iconic table’s birthday, its history and its future.
Using calcium beams — specifically a stable calcium isotope with a combined total of 48 protons and neutrons known as calcium-48 — has been highly successful. But to create bigger nuclei would take increasingly exotic materials. The californium and berkelium used in previous efforts are so rare that the target materials had to be made at Oak Ridge, where researchers stew materials in a nuclear reactor for months and carefully process the highly radioactive product that comes out.
A team at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science near Tokyo uses beams of vanadium , rather than calcium, slamming them into curium in the quest to grab elemental glory and find element 119. The group is starting with an existing accelerator and will soon switch to an accelerator upgraded to pump out ion beams that pack more punch. That revamped accelerator could be ready within a year, says RIKEN nuclear chemist Hiromitsu Haba.
Scientists in Russia have built a new accelerator facility, the Superheavy Element Factory, to search for elements 119 and 120.Simply detecting an element, however, doesn’t mean scientists know much about it. “How would one kilogram of flerovium behave, if I had it?” Düllmann asks, referring to element 114. “It would be unlike any other material.”
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