THE world may have a brand-new element, created by a team of chemists from
Russia and the US. It has 114 protons鈥攁 鈥渕agic鈥� size that theoreticians
predict should be much more stable than other super-heavy atoms.
The chemists bombarded a neutron-enriched isotope of plutonium, which has
94 protons, with an isotope of calcium.
鈥淲e saw an atom flying and then thirty seconds later, we saw an alpha decay,鈥�
says Ken Moody a team member based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California. 鈥淚t could be the decay of element 114.鈥� The Russian scientists on
the team came from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna near
Moscow.
Advertisement
鈥淚t looks pretty good, they鈥檙e not going off half-cocked,鈥� says Albert
Ghiorso, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
鈥淭his is the experiment I鈥檝e been trying to do for the past 25 years.鈥�
If their findings are confirmed, the long-sought element could validate the
theories about the factors governing the stability of very heavy atoms.