Element 118 is discovered

At the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, 20 physicists from JINR and 10 from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US sent a beam of calcium-48 ions into a target of californium-249 atoms to briefly create three representatives of element 118, which lies just beneath radon in the periodic table and is therefore a kind of noble gas. In separate runs with about 2 × 10¹⁹ calcium projectiles each, one atom of element 118 appeared in the year 2002 and two more in 2005; the exhaustive analysis took until now to complete. That analysis included the clear and unique decay sequence via the offloading of alpha particles: Nuclei of ²⁹⁴118 decay to become element ²⁹⁰116 (an isotope also first produced in these experiments), followed by ²⁸⁶114, ²⁸²112, and then the products of spontaneous fission. The average observed lifetime for element 118 was about one millisecond. As part of the continued quest for the so-called island of stability expected near N = 184, the Dubna-Livermore team next hopes to produce element 120 by crashing a beam of iron atoms into a plutonium target. To create still heavier nuclei, a beam of neutron-rich radioactive nuclei will be needed. (Y. T. Oganessian et al., Phys. Rev. C 74 , 044602, 2006 http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.74.044602 .)