The newly-created superheavy element 117, developed at the GSI accelerator lab in Darmstadt, Germany, may soon win a place on the periodic table. With 117 protons in its nucleus, it is one of the heaviest elements ever made and, scientists say, may lead to the discovery of a long sought "island of stability," where atoms with just the right number of protons in their nuclei would be long-lived instead of rapidly decaying as most superheavy elements do.
All elements with more than 104 protons in their nuclei are not found in nature and can only be created in a laboratory. But the more proton-rich atoms get, the faster they decay, making them radioactive. This is because the more protons are jammed into an atom, the more unstable it gets. Element 117 is so short-lived as to be close to nonexistent, with a half-life of only 50 thousandths of a second.
Element 117, temporarily named ununseptium, was first created in 2010 by a U.S.-Russian team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, according to a report by Scientific American. The proton-stuffed element has not been officially accepted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, so has yet to take its place on the periodic table. Before acceptance, an element must be independently confirmed by duplication.
Creating element 117 was no easy task. The process involved smashing calcium nuclei into berkelium, an element that is extremely hard to come by.
"We had to team up with the only place on the planet where berkelium can be produced and isolated in significant quantities," lead researcher Christoph Düllman told Scientific American. That place is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
It took about two years to produce about 13 milligrams of berkelium, which the Oak Ridge scientists shipped to Germany for the next phase of the process in which calcium ions are accelerated and smash into berkelium at 10 percent light speed. Occasionally, a calcium nucleus and a berkelium nucleus bond together to form a entirely new element. But the process is agonizingly slow–the scientists got about one atom per week, Düllman said.
Creation of a stable superheavy atom with the "magic number" of protons would help scientists better understand the physics and chemistry of atoms and, possibly, lead to new technologies.
Source : http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/superheavy-element-117-may-approach-island-of-stability-scientists-say/
