Element 116 and 118

Both the AIP and the New York Times are reporting that elements 116 and 118 have been discovered by a collaboration between Russian and American scientists working at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. This is the second time it’s been announced that element 118 has been seen, as a previous “discovery” turned out to be fraudulent, but everybody who comments in those articles says that they’re confident this one is the real thing.

The elements in question, which nobody has attempted to attach names to yet (have they learned nothing from the Planet Wars? Name one after a tv character, and you’ll get all sorts of free publciity…), only last for about a millisecond, and is made by slamming calcium atoms into californium atoms at a fair fraction of the speed of light. Nobody’s going to be doing chemistry with these guys any time soon.

That’s really pretty muc all there is to say about these articles. If you only read one, read the Times article, which has extremely silly computer-generated graphics purporting to show the new element travelling through the accelerator.

10 comments

  1. In other science news, please, please read this and tell me there’s some irony or snark hiding in here that I can’t identify:

    At first glance, this year’s crop of Nobel prizes came out quite nicely for the United States. Americans, after all, swept the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and economics. But a closer look suggests room for improvement. Americans dominate in the “easy” sciences–fields where it is comparatively less difficult to establish consensus–but lag in the arguably more complex realms of advancing culture and establishing peace.

    It gets worse.

    Decoding the forces driving cultural differences or alleviating poverty, it turns out, is far more difficult than, say, advancing our understanding of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription. The last Americans to be recognized by the Nobel Foundation in these “hard” subjects were Peace laureate Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Literature winner Toni Morrison in 1993.

  3. I find the use of the word “discover” interesting in this context.

    To me, to discover something involves being at least somewhat surprised that the thing exists: “I came home early from work today because I had a headache and discovered my wife in bed with my collaborator.” Not: “My neighbor called me in the lab and told me that she saw my collaborator enter my home, and she can see him and my wife in bed together now. I came home and discovered my wife in bed with my collaborator.”

    It is my understanding that the existence of these heavy elements has been predicted for quite some time, and that substantial effort has been made to obtain direct evidence of their existence. Would it be more accurate to say that they have been “confirmed”, rather than “discovered”?

  4. I think it is fairly important to put effort into something like these heavy elements, even if there are no practical applications yet. Just because we have no use for them now, does not mean we will not have any use later. As for discovery, unless we actually are able to reproduce something, other than hypothesize that it exists, the word discovery is very much fitting. Just because we know that black holes and other planets exist, when whe find one, we call it a discovery, not a confirmation. Prediction is very subjective, while a discovery is objective, hense its use while discussing the new element(s).

  6. So are we getting any closer to finding this mysterious “island of stability” thing?

    I was wondering the same thing. My fuzzy memory of these things is that both 116 and 118 should be on the island. Perhaps these particular isotopes were voted off.

  7. I too was wondering about the “island of stability” when you mentioned this.

    Is there any more you can tell us about that and how these new elements relate?

    Thanks!

  8. Neither of the articles I’ve read on this mentions the “island of stability” idea at all, so I’m not sure whether these should be on or off the island. Wikipedia’s island of stability article makes it look like these ought to be there, but I wouldn’t exactly call that definitive.

    The short answer is I don’t know.

  10. Also in the New York Times:

    If the results are confirmed, they would represent one more step toward the “island of stability” that theorists have predicted in even heavier regions of the periodic table. Nuclei have shell-like structures, and the most stable atoms contain so-called “magic numbers” of protons and neutrons that produce closed, or complete, shells.

    The numbers 2, 8, 20, 28, 50 and 82 are magic for both protons and neutrons. The highest known magic number for neutrons alone is 126, meaning that common lead, with 82 protons and 126 neutrons, is the heaviest known “doubly magic,” or extremely stable, isotope in the periodic table.

    But the theorists have predicted that there is another closed shell out beyond all elements discovered so far, including the latest one.

    “It’s rather like Plum Island at the end of Long Island,” Dr. Martin Blume, the overall editor of Physical Review, said. “You go there, there’s a gap, and then there’s Plum Island.”

    There is general agreement that the next neutron magic number is 184. But that is still out of reach of current experiments.

    The next proton magic number is a matter of disagreement.

    “That is, I think, the basis for looking in this region,” Dr. Blume said. “Have you reached the island of stability?”

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