14 DAY TRIAL // A team of German scientists can now boast an accomplishment not many scientists can, namely the fact that they have been credited with the discovery of a new chemical element, which will be added to Mendeleev's periodic table of elements under number 112. At this point, no name has yet been decided for the stuff, of which a single atom was produced more than ten years ago. Such super-heavy elements can only be made in particle accelerators, which spend a lot of time colliding protons or neutrons to make them a possibility. And there are several of them in the periodic table.
The science team, which is based at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany, and led by expert Sigurd Hofmann, has to come up with a name before the new addition to the table is permanently inserted, and starts being taught in schools. While they decide how to call it, other research teams around the world, with access to facilities that allow for this type of studies, continue to run in the race of discovering new super-heavy elements, in hopes of having their names added in history as well, the BBC News informs.
Hofmann, who began his work of identifying new elements in 1976, has also led the teams responsible for finding the table entries 107 to 111. For element 112, he used a 120-meter-long particle accelerator at the Center, in which zinc ions were accelerated at large speeds and then slammed into lead atoms. The goal was to get the nuclei of the two elements to fuse together, and to create new particles that did not exist in nature, or which could only be found in the vastness of space, at the core of stars.
However, there's a good reason why these nuclei cannot be found in nature, namely the fact that they decay extremely fast. In the case of element 112, this happens within a few milliseconds from its creation. But this destructive process releases amounts of energy that can be measured by experts to determine the mass of their source. It happens very rarely that instances of the process can be observed, as fusion seldom occurs. Thus far, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has only identified four such times, which means that this is one of the scarcest things in existence.