Physicists Just Created an Element Using a Particle Beam
A team of scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California announced today that it created livermorium, or element 116, using a titanium particle beam for the first time.
The achievement puts scientists close to the island of stability, a theorized point at which superheavy elements may be long-lived, making them easier to study.
“We needed for nature to be kind, and nature was kind,” said Reiner Kruecken, director of nuclear science at Berkeley Lab, in a laboratory release. “We think it will take about 10 times longer to make 120 than 116. It’s not easy, but it seems feasible now.”
The team’s discovery was announced today and presented at the Nuclear Structure 2024 conference. The team’s paper will be published shortly on the preprint repository arXiv and has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.
A titanium beam generates element 116
The researchers used a beam of titanium-50 (a certain isotope of the element) in the attempt to generate element 116, livermorium. They succeeded, making it the heaviest element yet made at Berkeley Lab. The lab’s researchers have been involved in the discovery of 16 elements to date, from Technetium (43) to Seaborgium (106).
“We’re very confident that we’re seeing element 116 and its daughter particles,” said Jacklyn Gates, a nuclear scientist at Berkeley Lab who led the recent effort, in the same release. “There’s about a 1 in 1 trillion chance that it’s a statistical fluke.”
To turn the titanium into a beam, the scientists heated up a chunk of the element until it began to vaporize at nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,649 degrees Celsius). Then, the team bombarded the titanium with microwaves, removing 22 of its electrons and readying the ions to be accelerated in Berkeley Lab’s 88-Inch Cyclotron.
The titanium ions were aimed at a target—plutonium in this case—and trillions of the ions hit the target per second to fuse into an entirely different element. The team ultimately made two livermorium atoms across 22 days of operations. Using titanium in a beam is a new way of making heavier elements; previously, elements 114 through 118 had been made with a beam of calcium-48.
“When we’re trying to make these incredibly rare elements, we are standing at the absolute edge of human knowledge and understanding, and there is no guarantee that physics will work the way we expect,” said Jennifer Pore, a nuclear physicist in Berkeley Lab’s heavy element group. “Creating element 116 with titanium validates that this method of production works and we can now plan our hunt for element 120.”
Next up: the hunt for element 120
If the team is successful in that hunt, they could create element 120, which would be the heaviest atom yet created. Element 120 would be part of the so-called island of stability, a class of superheavy elements that would survive longer than the superheavy elements discovered so far.
According to the lab release, the attempt to create element 120 could begin in 2025, after which it would take several years to produce the element should the team be successful. The physicists are working in the deep end of the periodic table, with sights on finding an even heavier, longer-lived limit to the atom.