Predictions for superheavy nuclei

APR 01, 1972

The quest for ever‐heavier nuclei turns to heavy‐ion accelerators that could produce hundreds of excited short‐lived species—and possibly a few, in their ground states, that live for years.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3070808

James Rayford Nix

A frantic search for nuclei considerably heavier than any known up to now has been going on for the past five years. The search for these “superheavy” nuclei has included attempts to produce them artificially, as products of various reactions at accelerators throughout the world, as well as attempts to find them in nature. Man’s quest in nature has led him from a 14th‐century Russian Orthodox church to the ocean floor off the Fiji Islands, from California platinum and gold mines to meteorites and moon rocks. None of these attempts have yet resulted in any conclusive evidence for the existence of superheavy nuclei. But with the Berkeley Super‐HILAC now joining accelerators in the USSR and France that are potentially capable of producing them, the coming years will witness a renewed search for these nuclei, whose existence was predicted seven years ago.

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More about the authors

James Rayford Nix, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, University of California, Los Alamos, New Mexico.