Extreme atoms are pushing the bounds of physics and chemistry
t the far end of the periodic table is a realm where nothing is quite as it should be. The elements here, starting at atomic number 104 , have never been found in nature. In fact, they’d emphatically prefer not to exist. Their nuclei, bursting with protons and neutrons, tear themselves apart via fission or radioactive decay within instants of their creation.
Affixed to the wall in a concrete-block corridor known as Cave 1 in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , just steps from one of the few instruments in the world that can create superheavy atoms, is a poster-size printout of a table that organizes elements by nuclide, meaning based on the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus.
The first of the superheavies, rutherfordium, was synthesized here in 1969. Rutherfordium, named after Ernest Rutherford, who helped to explain the structure of atoms, was also made a few years prior by the Russian Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, the same group that first created oganesson in 2002 . Beginning in the late 1950s, the competition to add new elements got hotter than the ion beams used to make them.
“Everything we’re doing right now ... it doesn’t have practical applications,” Gates says. “But if you look at your cell phone and all the technology that went into that—that technology started back in the Bronze Age. People didn’t know it would result in these devices that we’re all glued to and utterly dependent on.
Most of the time the beam passes right through the target without any nuclear interactions. But with six trillion beam particles winging through the targets per second, an eventual nucleus-to-nucleus collision is inevitable. When conditions are just right, these pileups mash the nuclei together, creating a very temporary new superheavy atom moving at nearly 600,000 meters per second.
The reason for these strange characteristics has to do with the electrons. Electrons orbit nuclei at certain energy levels known as shells, each of which can hold a specific number of electrons. Electrons in outer shells—where there may not be enough electrons to completely fill the shell—are responsible for forging chemical bonds with other atoms.
Even outside superheavy territory, chemists debate the placement of certain elements in the periodic table. Since 2015 a working group at the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has been refereeing a debate over which elements should go in the third column of the table: lanthanum and actinium or lutetium and lawrencium .
There is an interesting liminal space at the edges of what nuclei can bear, Nazarewicz notes. To be declared an element, a nucleus must survive for at least 10second, the time it takes for electrons to glom on and form an atom. But in theory, nuclear lifetimes can be as short as 10second. In this infinitesimal gap, you might find nuclei without electron clouds, incapable of chemistry, he says.
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