A method that helped create two atoms of the rare, super-heavy element livermorium may pave the way towards making the hypothetical element 120
By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
23 July 2024
Jacklyn Gates at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory separating atoms of livermorium
Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab 2024 The Regents of the University of California
The third-heaviest element in the universe has been made in a way that offers a route for synthesising the elusive element 120, which would be the heaviest element in the periodic table.
“We were very shocked, very surprised, very relieved that we didn’t make any bad choices in setting up the instrumentation,” says Jacklyn Gates at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California.
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She and her colleagues created the element livermorium by smashing a beam of charged titanium atoms into a piece of plutonium. Titanium has never been used in such an experiment because it is tricky to turn it into a well-controlled beam and it takes millions of trillions of collisions to produce very few new atoms. Yet, physicists think a titanium beam will be crucial for creating the hypothetical element 120, also known as unbinilium, which would have 120 protons in its nucleus.
The researchers started with rare isotopes of titanium, which they vaporised in a special oven at 1650°C (around 3000°F). Next, they used microwaves to turn the hot titanium vapour into a charged beam, which could then be fed into a particle accelerator. When the beam reached roughly 10 per cent of the speed of light and collided with the plutonium target, the resulting debris hit a detector that revealed signatures of exactly two atoms of livermorium.
Each atom rapidly decayed into other elements, as was expected – the stability of atomic nuclei decreases as the mass of an atom increases. But the measurement was so precise that there is only about a one in a trillion chance that the finding was a statistical fluke, says Gates. The researchers presented their findings on 23 July at the Nuclear Structure 2024 conference at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.