Researchers create Element 118 again, this time for real

Reminiscence of one of Physics' most embarrassing cases of scientific misconduct came alive on Monday, when a team of Russian and American scientists said that they have created a new super-heavy element, atomic number 118.

In 1999, a research team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Calif. announced that it had created element 118 by a different route, but in 2001 the team retracted its claim to have produced ununoctium, the new element temporarily named, after other laboratories failed to reproduce their findings and after a reanalysis of the original data did not indicate the production of the element 118.

A subsequent investigation also suggested that the original finding was the result of fraud on the part of one of the scientists, named Victor Ninov, who was later fired by Berkeley.

Now the researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, announced yesterday that they have created the heaviest known element, atomic number 118- for real this time.

Researchers said they smashed together calcium with the manmade element Californium to create an atom with 118 protons in its nucleus. They used a cyclotron to bombard a target of the man-made element californium-249 with ions of calcium-48. In two separate tests, they bombarded the target with 40,000,000,000,000,000,000 ions, producing three atoms of element 118. Each atom had 118 protons and 179 neutrons in its nucleus, giving it an atomic weight of 297.

The newly found element lasted for just one millisecond, but it was the heaviest element ever made. It was the prime manmade inert gas, an atomic family that includes helium, neon and radon.

It is the fifth ultra-heavy element produced by the team which has come to dominate the creation of rare, short-lived elements. Before the latest find, the same team has created four other elements, 113, 114, 115 and 116.

The findings by the joint team are published on Tuesday in the journal Physical Review C.

Although the researchers produced only three atoms of element 118, and each lasted for less than one-thousandth of a second, the team said there was less than one chance in 10,000 that there was a mistake in identification.

"We selected a completely different nuclear reaction, performed with completely different people in a different laboratory," said physicist Ken Moody of Livermore, who headed the American team, at a news conference yesterday. "Everything we do is checked and double-checked."

If confirmed, the element 118 would be placed beneath radon on the periodic table of elements, said Moody.

The extremely short lifetime of Element 118 means scientists will look for their island of stability among even heavier elements. "The decay properties of all the isotopes that we have made so far paint the picture of a large, sort of flat 'Island of Stability' and indicate that we may have luck if we try to go even heavier," said Moody.

The "Island of Stability" is a term from nuclear physics that describes the probabilities of elements which have specifically stable "magic numbers" of protons and neutrons. This would let certain isotopes of some transuranic elements (elements with atomic numbers greater than 92) to be far more stable than others, and thus destroy much more slowly.

According to the research tem, the community of heavy elements hunters will continue their search for new elements till the limit of nuclear stability is not found. With the expectations to find the limit, the team now intends to look for element 120 by bombarding a plutonium target with iron isotopes, in 2007.