Element 112 evidence starts a rush on proton beam stops

Suppose you bombard a tungsten target with very high‐energy protons. Sometimes a tungsten nucleus might receive enough energy to climb the Coulomb barrier in a second tungsten nucleus and produce some superheavy nucleus. That was the hypothesis of Amnon Marinov (on leave from Hebrew University at the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory) and his collaborators, C. J. Batty and A. I. Kilvington (Rutherford), G. W. A. Newton and V. J. Robinson (University of Manchester) and J. D. Hemingway (Universities Research Reactor, Risley, Lancashire), who examined two tungsten beam stops from the CERN proton synchrotron. After studying their alpha‐decay properties and also observing spontaneous fission, they concluded that they may have observed production of element 112 by secondary reactions in tungsten targets irradiated by 24‐GeV protons (Nature 229, 464, 1971).

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