Livermore scientists team with Russia to discover element 118

[Mr. McD]

In experiments conducted at the JINR U400 cyclotron between February and June 2005, the researchers observed atomic decay patterns, or chains, that establish the existence of element 118. In these decay chains, previously observed element 116 is produced via the alpha decay of element 118.

http://www.llnl.gov/pao/news/news_releases/2006/NR-06-10-03.html

[Ezlivin]

1. Your Mission: Convince Bush of the veracity of this science

And try to convince him that the earth, despite its appearance from his front porch in Crawford, is not flat.

Me? I like the heavier elements, but they don't tend to stick around too long.

[kimmerspixelated]

2. In Layman's terms please?

[TechBear_Seattle]

3. Brief history of the elements

After the Big Bang, the universe consisted of about 99.9999% hydrogen (ie atoms with one proton and one electron), with the remainder being mostly helium and probably a few atoms of lithium.

In a star, the cycle of "burning" hydrogen produces heavier elements, up to iron (which has 26 protons and usually 26 electrons.) When the iron content of a star starts to impede the nuclear furnace, it is likely to explode. This explosion produces enough energy to fuse even heavier elements. All of the nickel, copper, zinc, silver, gold, etc found on Earth were synthesized when a star blew up.

On Earth, the heaviest naturally occuring element found in any quantity is uranium, with an atomic number (number of protons) of 92. Heavier elements might be created in novae, but they are unstable and tend to decay into lighter elements. We have been creating small amounts of "trans-uranium" elements for several decades, usually by slamming smaller atoms together and hoping they stick. Plutonium, with an atomic number of 94, can be made by slaming deuterium (a form of hydrogen) into uranium, producing first neptunium (with 93 protons) then plutonium.

Most trans-uranium elements are short lived. Fermium, with 100 protons, has a "half life" of about 3 minutes. A half-life is a statistical value that provides the stability of an element. For fermium, it means that, given any amount of the pure element, half will turn into a lighter element in about 3 minutes. Three minutes latter, half of the remaining fermium will decay into something else. After nine minues (three half lives), only 1/8th of the original amount is still fermium.

In the interest of scientific exploration, physicists have been synthesizing heavier and heavier elements. Often times, these elements are so unstable that they have half-lives measured in seconds. What makes it so fascinating is that exploration has, so far, confirmed predictions made by the periodic table of elements. Ununoctium (Latin for "element 118") should be a noble gas, chemically related to radon, xenon, neon and helium. According to the Wikipedia article for ununoctium, it has a half-life of about 0.86 microseconds and decays first into ununhexium ("element 116"), then seaborgium (element 102.)

Added: Wikipedia link to the Periodic Table. With that, you can click on any of the elements to pull up the article about that element.

[Kutjara]

7. Excellent explanation, but...

...what about the most important question? Since Uranium, Neptunium and Plutonium appear to have been named with reference to the outer three planets in our Solar System, will Plutonium now have to be renamed 'dwarfplanetium'?

[Phx_Dem]

4. link to cnn article

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/10/17/new.element.ap/index.html

[RedEarth]

5. LAT article......Element 118 Created, Scientists Report

Element 118 Created, Scientists Report
A U.S.-Russian team is seeking even heavier atoms in a theoretical `island of stability.'
By Thomas H. Maugh II
Times Staff Writer

October 17, 2006

A U.S. and Russian team said Monday that it had created element 118, the heaviest known to date.

It is the fifth ultra-heavy element produced by the team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, which has come to dominate the creation of short-lived elements.

Although they produced only three atoms of element 118, and each lasted for less than a thousandth of a second, the team said that there is less than one chance in 10,000 of mistaken identity.

A team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced in 1999 that they had created element 118 by a different route, but those results were shown to have been fabricated by physicist Victor Ninov, who was eventually fired by Berkeley.

"We selected a completely different nuclear reaction, performed with completely different people in a different laboratory," said physicist Ken Moody of Livermore, who led the American team, at a Monday news conference. "Everything we do is checked and double-checked."

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-element17oct17,1,2359660,print.story?coll=la-news-science&ctrack=1&cset=true

[eppur_se_muova]

6. 118 forms an anion -- interesting consequence of relativistic effects

http://www.chem.helsinki.fi/~pyykko/pekka/pekka.html
159.E. Eliav, U. Kaldor, Y. Ishikawa and P. Pyykkö: Element 118: The first rare gas with an electron affinity, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 5350-5352 (1996).
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v77/i27/p5350_1
Element 118: The First Rare Gas with an Electron Affinity

Ephraim Eliav and Uzi Kaldor
School of Chemistry, Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel

Yasuyuki Ishikawa
Department of Chemistry, University of Puerto Rico, P.O. Box 23346, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00931–3346

Pekka Pyykkö
Department of Chemistry, P.O. Box 55 (A.I. Virtasen aukio 1), FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland

Received 27 August 1996

The electron affinity of the rare gas element 118 is calculated by the relativistic coupled cluster method based on the Dirac-Coulomb-Breit Hamiltonian. A large basis set ( 34s26p20d14f9g6h4i) of Gaussian-type orbitals is used. The external 40 electrons are correlated. Inclusion of both relativity and correlation yields an electron affinity of 0.056 eV, with an estimated error of 0.01 eV. Nonrelativistic or uncorrelated calculations give no electron affinity for the atom.

©1996 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v77/p5350 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.77.5350 PACS:
31.30.Jv, 27.90.+b, 31.25.Eb