14 DAY TRIAL // Uranium is the heaviest chemical element that can be found in nature. Over the years, scientists have been trying to discover other, heavier chemicals, and their efforts yielded plutonium in the 1940s, which went on to be used for weapons of mass destruction. Others have been discovered since, but our ability to synthesize new chemicals is constantly diminishing. Therefore, when a Russian team announced in 1999 that it had discovered the elusive Element 114, the scientific community was in awe. Though it took more than a decade, American experts were recently able to confirm the find.
Physicists at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) managed to obtain the heavy element by firing calcium isotopes into a plutonium target, with the help of a particle accelerator. What makes obtaining heavy elements so difficult is the fact that their nuclei are unstable, and they disintegrate within fractions of a second. When the Russian team, based at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, in Dubna, reported the discovery of 114, what made it special was the fact that the element remained stable for several seconds, before breaking apart.
“We’re learning the limits of nuclei. How many protons can you pack into a nucleus before it falls apart?” Berkeley Laboratory nuclear physicist Ken Gregorich says, quoted by Wired. Uranium, for example, has 92 protons inside its nucleus. Though it appeared futile to try to search for heavier elements, hypothetical studies revealed that certain stable isotopes of ultra-heavy atoms could exist in what had been termed an “island of stability.” These proposed isotopes “live” for more than the mere fractions of a second their unstable varieties do.
“The term ‘magic’ was continually used – Seaborg and others spoke of a magic ridge, a magic mountain and a magic island of elements. This vision came to haunt the imagination of physicists the world over. Whether or not it was scientifically important, it became psychologically imperative to reach, or at least to sight, this magic territory,” neurologist Oliver Sachs says. “Our results and the Dubna results show that there is some stability there. If we didn’t have extra stability due to the shell effects, these things would decay faster than we could ever detect them with lifetimes on the order of 10-20 seconds rather than 10-1 seconds,” Gregorich adds.