A group of scientists at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced today that they have created the first element, or element 116, using titanium particle beams.
The achievement brings scientists closer to islands of stability, the theoretical point at which superheavy elements might persist for long periods of time, making them easier to study.
“We need nature to be merciful, and nature to be merciful,” Reiner Kruecken, director of nuclear science at Berkeley Lab, said in a lab news release. “We think it will take longer to make 120 116 takes about 10 times longer. It’s not easy, but it seems doable now.”
The team announced the discovery today and presented it at the Nuclear Structures 2024 conference. The team’s paper is about to be published on the preprint repository arXiv and has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.
Titanium Beam Generating Element 116
The researchers used beams of titanium 50, a certain isotope of the element, to try to generate element 116, known as heparin. They succeeded, making it the heaviest element ever created at Berkeley Lab. To date, researchers at the laboratory have been involved in the discovery of 16 elements, from technetium (43) to sibodim (106).
“We are very confident that we are seeing element 116 and its daughter particles,” Jacklyn Gates, a Berkeley Lab nuclear scientist who led the latest research, said in the same press release. “There’s about a one-in-a-trillion chance that it’s a statistical fluke.”
To turn titanium into a beam, scientists heated a piece of the element until it began to evaporate at temperatures approaching 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,649 degrees Celsius). The team then bombarded the titanium with microwaves, removing 22 electrons and preparing the ions for acceleration in Berkeley Lab’s 88-inch cyclotron.
Titanium ions are aimed at a target (in this case, plutonium), and trillions of ions hit the target every second, fusing into an entirely different element. The team eventually produced two atoms of limonium in 22 days of operation. The use of titanium in beams is a new way to create heavier components. Previously, elements 114 to 118 were made from calcium 48 bundles.
“We are standing at the absolute edge of human knowledge and understanding when we try to make these extremely rare elements, and there is no guarantee that physics will work the way we expect,” said Berkeley nuclear physicist Jennifer Pore, who studies heavy elements in the lab. Group. “Creating element 116 in titanium validates the effectiveness of this production method, and we can now plan to find element 120.”
Next step: Find element 120
If the team is successful in this search, they could create element 120, which would be the heaviest atom ever created. Element 120 will be part of a so-called island of stability, a class of superheavy elements that have persisted longer than any superheavy elements discovered to date.
According to a release from the lab, attempts to create component 120 may begin in 2025, and if the team is successful, it will take several years to produce the component. Physicists are delving deep into the periodic table of elements, hoping to find the limits of heavier, longer-lived atoms.
