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Element 118 detected

Posted by Hemos on from the there-it-is dept.

Hermann wrote to us with the news that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has isolated element 118, and it's immediate decay product, element 116. Check out the technical details as well as the 88-Inch Cyclotron used.

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Neat. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3

    Great. It will be interesting to see what the half-lifes of elements in the "Island of Stability" end up being. Half-lives of some of the intermediate elements have been milliseconds or longer, but it remains to be seen whether elements in the island will be stable enough to synthesize in macroscopic quantities (not that there's a good reason to do so yet).

  2. Re:This would be GREAT for armor piercing shells. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3
    Depleted uranium is already used in armor piercing shells because their high density per unit volume enables shells to carry far more momentum than standard shells (and therefore makes them harder to stop). Element 118 would work even better.


    I'm not sure that it would. The atomic weight of an element isn't the only influence on its density. The density is determined by the atomic weight, the crystal structure of the element in solid form, and the distance between atoms. The last item (and the middle item, to an extent) is a result of the structure of the electron shells around the atom.


    IIRC, the second row of transition elements had a peculiar property that made atoms in that row very compact. Similar pecularities may exist elsewhere, but IIRC the actinides and following elements weren't particularly dense.


    Osmium is still the densest element IIRC. I'm not sure exactly why uranium is used in shells as opposed to something denser, but it still works. It's dense, stronger than lead, and they have a lot of it left over when they produce enriched uranium (depleted uranium is uranium with less than the usual amount of U235; enriched has more).


    Superheavy elements would be very difficult to produce in significant quantities with known techniques. Shells will probably continue to be uranium for quite a while.