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Extreme chemistry: experiments at the edge of the periodic table

As the chase for new elements slows, scientists focus on deepening their understanding of the superheavy ones they already know.
  1. Philip Ball

    1. Philip Ball is a science writer based in London, UK.

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Illustration by Señor Salme

If you wanted to create the world’s next undiscovered element, number 119 in the periodic table, here’s a possible recipe. Take a few milligrams of berkelium, a rare radioactive metal that can be made only in specialized nuclear reactors. Bombard the sample with a beam of titanium ions, accelerated to around one-tenth the speed of light. Keep this up for about a year, and be patient. Very patient. For every 10 quintillion (1018) titanium ions that slam into the berkelium target — roughly a year’s worth of beam time — the experiment will probably produce only one atom of element 119.

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Nature 565, 552-555 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00285-9

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 28 February 2019: An earlier version of this feature erred in its explanation of why none of the currently identified isotopes for elements 109–111 are suitable for chemical studies. In fact, the problem is not the length of the half-lives, but that the isotopes are created in decay chains, not through collisions. Also, the Y-axis of the graph in ‘The superheavy realm’ was mislabelled.

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