Chemists searching for the island of stability now have a better map. Thanks to the discovery of six new variations of the superheavy elements on the bottom rung of the periodic table, scientists are closer to creating elements that are expected to last long enough for in-depth study.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California saw the isotopes of rutherfordium, seaborgium, hassium, darmstadtium, and copernicium by watching the decay of the yet-to-be-named element 114, a synthetic element first produced about a decade ago. Each isotope of an element differs in the number of neutrons in its nucleus, a variable that can affect radioactivity and other properties.
The nuclear chemists created a sample of element 114 by bombarding a plutonium target with a beam of calcium ions. As the handful of atoms began to decay — a process that takes less than a tenth of a second — the team saw six previously undiscovered isotopes of other heavy elements, the researchers report in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.
Heavy radioactive elements tend to decay quickly, most commonly by emitting an alpha particle — two protons and two neutrons, the nucleus of a helium atom. Researchers saw element 114 spit out alpha particles in a chain, creating isotopes of elements 112, 110, 108, 106, and 104 — with 169, 167, 165, 163 and 161 neutrons respectively.