Berkeley Lab Leapfrogs to Elements 116 and 118

AUG 01, 1999

The discovery of two new elements where none had been expected gives nuclear physicists hope of exploring hitherto inaccessible regions of the nuclear chart.

DOI: 10.1063/1.882771

Barbara Goss Levi

If nuclear physicists were surprised last January by a reported sighting of element 114, they were utterly floored by a recent report of elements 116 and 118. No one had thought that these two were worth looking for with today’s accelerators. No one, that is, except theorist Robert Smolańczuk of Warsaw’s Andrej Soltan Institute for Nuclear Studies, who had calculated that certain reactions can generate isotopes of elements 116 through 119 with cross sections orders of magnitude greater than expected. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where Smolańczuk is currently a Fulbright scholar, took a chance that he was right and set up the prescribed experiment for producing the new element ${}^{293}118$ (and its daughter ${}^{289}116$ ). They found three candidates in 11 days.