A team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California announced today that they created livermorium, or element 116, using a titanium particle beam for the first time.
The achievement puts scientists close to the island of stability, a theorized point where superheavy elements can be long-lived, making them easier to study.
“We needed nature to be kind, and nature was kind,” Reiner Kruecken, director of nuclear science at Berkeley Lab, said in a lab release. “We think it will take about 10 times longer to do 120 than 116. It’s not easy, but it seems possible now.”
The team’s discovery was announced today and presented at Nuclear power structure 2024 conference. The team’s paper will be published shortly on the preprint archive arXiv and has been submitted to Physical review letters.
A titanium beam produces element 116
The researchers used a beam of titanium-50 (a particular isotope of the element) in the attempt to generate element 116, livermorium. They succeeded, making it the heaviest element yet made at Berkeley Lab. The laboratory’s researchers have so far been involved in the discovery of 16 elements, from Technetium (43) to Seaborgium (106).
“We are very confident that we are seeing element 116 and its daughter particles,” Jacklyn Gates, a nuclear scientist at Berkeley Lab who led the latest effort, said in the same release. “There’s about a 1 in 1 trillion chance that it’s a statistical fluke.”
To turn the titanium into a beam, the researchers heated some of the element until it began to vaporize at nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,649 degrees Celsius). Then the team bombarded the titanium with microwaves, removing 22 of its electrons and preparing the ions to be accelerated in Berkeley Labs 88-inch cyclotron.
The titanium ions were aimed at a target – plutonium in this case – and trillions of ions hit the target per second to fuse into a completely different element. The team ultimately made two liver morium atoms over 22 days of operations. Using titanium in a beam is a new way to make heavier elements; previously, elements 114 to 118 had been made with a beam of calcium-48.
“When we’re trying to make these incredibly rare elements, we’re at the absolute edge of human knowledge and understanding, and there’s no guarantee that the physics will work out the way we expect,” said Jennifer Pore, a nuclear physicist in Berkeley Lab’s heavy elements group . “Creating element 116 with titanium confirms that this production method works and we can now plan our hunt for element 120.”
Next up: the hunt for element 120
If the team is successful in that pursuit, they could create element 120, which would be the heaviest atom ever created. Element 120 would be part of the so-called island of stability, a class of superheavy elements that would survive longer than the superheavy elements discovered so far.
According to the lab release, the attempt to create element 120 could begin in 2025, after which it would take several years to produce the element if the team were to succeed. The physicists are working in the deep part of the periodic table, aiming to find an even heavier, longer-lived limit for the atom.
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