Element 114 Verified

ExRex writes "A team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has observed the production of superheavy element 114, confirming the results of researchers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. Those researchers first reported producing element 114 in 1999. Such independent verification is important, particularly given the evidence of fabricated results for other superheavy elements. If you're a subscriber to Physical Review Letters, you can download the full article."

Comments

Re:Why the need to 'discover' the elements?

[simcop2387]

mostly because the fun information these days isn't related to the number of electrons but how stable the atoms are, which helps theories that describe how stable the elements should be to be verified.

Re:And why is this important?

[JoshuaZ]

A variety of reasons. First of all, because it is interesting and fun. Why do you think people are searching for very large prime numbers? http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/15/154227/12M-Digit-Prime-Number-Sets-Record-Nets-100000 Do you think they are all doing this because of possible benefits to abstract areas of number theory any more than people climb Everest for practical reasons? Second, seeing that these elements match up to our predictions help us get a better understanding of physics. Third, there is some reason to suspect that there may be farther ahead islands of stability where the elements become more stable again. While it is unlikely that those areas are stable enough for those elements to live long enough to be of practical use, the chance otherwise is not tiny. So there may be direct practical benefits. But the main reasons are because it is cool and humans are ever curious creatures.

Re:And why is this important?

[Nazlfrag]

Perhaps the same reason we don't see astronomically common stable elements like Tellerium.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellurium:

The extreme rarity of tellurium in the Earth's crust is not a reflection of its cosmic abundance, which is in fact greater than that of rubidium, even though rubidium is ten thousand times more abundant in the Earth's crust. The extraordinarily low abundance of tellurium on Earth is because during the Earth's formation, the stable form of elements in the absence of oxygen and water was controlled by the oxidation and reduction of hydrogen. Under this scenario elements such as tellurium which form volatile hydrides were severely depleted during the formation of the Earth's crust through evaporation. Tellurium and selenium are the heavy elements mostly depleted in the Earth's crust by this process.

Re:And why is this important?

[physburn]

Most of the transuranic elements, are super unstable nucleii, that decay in second. According the nuclear shell theory, certain nucleii with magic numbers of either protons or neutron or both, would be extra stable, maybe stable enough to be a useful radioisotope. Proton numbers 110,114 and 126 are sure magic numbers. So finding element 114 should help confirm the theory, unfortunately its very hard to make such an element with enough neutrons, so the isotopes confirmed today are neutron short and only last a few second, 288 and 288 Uuq 114, better than the near by isotopes that only last milliseconds, but to short even to be chemically analysed. 298 Uuq 114, (ten neutrons more), is the on that is predicted to be to extra stable.

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Nuclear Power Feed @ Feed Distiller

Re:And why is this important?

[wizardforce]

Well it's not like they're purposely missing the target here... They've tried to make isotopes with a higher n/p ratio near the island of stability it's just that it's hard to find two high n/p isotopes to smash together to make a larger one. As you go toward higher elements the n/p ratio needs to be larger to afford more stable isotopes. This means that you'd effectively need to smash two isotopes together that have n/p ratios ideal for higher elements but markedly unstable for lower elements. THen there's the problem that when you smash two isotopes together to make these higher elements, it often knocks out a few neutrons from the composite nucleus due to the sheer high energies involved. This means that you'd probably have to use lower isotopes that have even higher n/p ratios that just don't last very long. (they're very unstable) Of course you'd think that you could just keep adding neutrons or tritium nuclei repeatedly to get higher elements but that doesn't work either as it usually ends up causing a fission reaction. In fact, the vast majority of any reactions attempted so far to produce higher elements has resulted in an inordinate number of composite nuclei undergoing fission immediately. Out of 10^12 reactions, you'd be fairly lucky to find one of them actually producing an isotope of a higher element.

Re:Why the need to 'discover' the elements?

[jbezorg]

Iron Oxide is not the degradation of the iron atom but the binding of the molecule to Oxygen. In fact, nuclei of the iron atom has one of the highest binding energies per nucleon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binding_energy_curve_-_common_isotopes.svg

To the right of the apex in the chart above, fission is the process to release energy. To the left of the apex, fusion. At the apex, one of the elements you will find is iron. To make a long story short, this chart is one of the reasons why you find iron cores in stars.