Superheavy chemistry, one atom at a time

5 hours ago (Left to right) Ken Gregorich, Jackie Gates, Heino Nitsche

It's now more or less official: element 117 will have a seat at the periodic table. Earlier this month an international team of scientists that included researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Nuclear Science Division found two atoms of superheavy element 117. The experiment, conducted at a particle accelerator at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, builds on the previous 117 experiment by a different team working in Dubna, Russia in 2010 that identified six atoms of the superheavy element.

Heino Nitsche leads Berkeley Lab's superheavy-element research. The group is involved in not only in the verification of new elements like 117, but also in figuring out the best ways to do chemistry experiments with the few, fleeting atoms on the roster of superheavies. He and staff scientists Kenneth Gregorich and Jackie Gates recently discussed their roles in the new 117 experiment. They also described how their team, which includes scientist Greg Pang, does chemistry one atom at a time.

First of all, why do superheavy elements matter?

Heino Nitsche: The question is why elements matter, period. It's because they are part of our daily life, and we are moving forward with our understanding of science. When I was young, we had element 106 and we thought that was it, that we'd never get any higher. In the last 30 years, we as a community have created elements 107 to 118 and confirmed most of these. So we have done the unbelievable, the unthinkable.

How were you involved in the most recent experiment to produce element 117?

Jackie Gates: Whenever you have any new results, you always want to make sure somebody else can verify it. That's what we did. They did a data analysis at GSI and we also got a copy of the raw data. We wrote our own analysis code so we could look and see if we agreed with what they saw. We just brought a different point of view in the way that we approached the data.

Why are chemistry experiments of superheavy elements important?

Nitsche: We are trying to establish them in the periodic table and see if they are homologs to the other elements in their group. The principle of homologs is that as you go down the periodic table, all the elements in a column share properties because they share the same electronic structurethe outer electrons that bind to other atoms are in the same configuration. So far we've been luckythey're all homologs.

Why wouldn't they be homologs?

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Superheavy chemistry, one atom at a time