Author: Emily Conover / Source: Science News

The rare radioactive substance made its way from the United States to Russia on a commercial flight in June 2009. Customs officers balked at accepting the package, which was ensconced in lead shielding and emblazoned with bold-faced warnings and the ominous trefoil symbols for ionizing radiation. Back it went across the Atlantic.
U.S. scientists enclosed additional paper work and the parcel took a second trip, only to be rebuffed again. All the while, the precious cargo, 22 milligrams of an element called berkelium created in a nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, was deteriorating. Day by day, its atoms were decaying. “We were all a little frantic on our end,” says Oak Ridge nuclear engineer Julie Ezold.
On the third try, the shipment cleared customs. At a laboratory in Dubna, north of Moscow, scientists battered the berkelium with calcium ions to try to create an even rarer substance. After 150 days of pummeling, the researchers spotted six atoms of an element that had never been seen on Earth. In 2015, after other experiments confirmed the discovery, element 117, tennessine, earned a spot on the periodic table (SN: 2/6/16, p. 7).

Scientists are hoping to stretch the periodic table even further, beyond tennessine and three other recently discovered elements (113, 115 and 118) that completed the table’s seventh row. Producing the next elements will require finessing new techniques using ultrapowerful beams of ions, electrically charged atoms. Not to mention the stress of shipping more radioactive material across borders.
But questions circulating around the periodic table’s limits are too tantalizing not to make the effort. It’s been 150 years since Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev created his periodic table. Yet “we still cannot answer the question: Which is the heaviest element that can exist?” says nuclear chemist Christoph Düllmann of the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany.
At the far edge of the periodic table, elements decay within instants of their formation, offering very little time to study their properties. In fact, scientists still know little about the latest crew of newfound elements. So while some scientists are hunting for never-before-seen elements, others want to learn more about the table’s newcomers and the strange behaviors those superheavy elements may exhibit.
For such outsized atoms, chemistry can get weird, as atomic nuclei, the hearts at the center of each atom, bulge with hundreds of protons and neutrons. Around them swirl great flocks of electrons, some moving at close to the speed of light. Such extreme conditions might have big consequences — messing with the periodic table’s tidy order, in which elements in each column are close chemical kin that behave in similar ways.

Scientists keep pushing these superheavy elements further as part of the search for what’s poetically known as the island of stability. Atoms with certain numbers of protons and neutrons are expected to live longer than their fleeting friends, persisting perhaps for hours rather than fractions of a second. Such an island would give scientists enough time to study those elements more closely and understand their quirks. The first glimpses of that mysterious atoll have been spotted, but it’s not clear how to get a firm footing on its shores.
Driving all this effort is a deep curiosity about how elements act at the boundaries of the periodic table. “This might sound corny, but it’s really just [about] pure scientific understanding,” says nuclear chemist Dawn Shaughnessy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “We have these things that are really at the extremes of matter and we don’t understand right now how they behave.”

An element is defined by the number of protons it contains. Create an atom with more protons than ever before, and you’ve got yourself a brand new element. Each element comes in a variety of types, known as isotopes, distinguished by the number of neutrons in the nucleus. Changing the number of neutrons in an atom’s nucleus alters the delicate balance of forces that makes a nucleus stable or that causes it to decay quickly. Different isotopes of an element might have wildly different half-lives, the period of time it takes for half of the atoms in a sample to decay into smaller elements.
Mendeleev’s periodic table, presented to the Russian Chemical Society on March 6, 1869, contained only 63 elements (SN: 1/19/19, p. 14). At first, scientists added to the periodic table by isolating elements from naturally occurring materials, for example, by scrutinizing minerals and separating them into their constituent parts. But that could take scientists only so far. All the elements beyond uranium (element 92) must be created artificially; they do not exist in significant quantities in nature. Scientists discovered elements beyond uranium by bombarding atoms with neutrons or small atomic nuclei or by sifting through the debris from thermonuclear weapons tests.
But to make the heaviest elements, researchers adopted a new brute force approach: slamming beams of heavy atoms into a target, a disk that holds atoms of another element. If scientists are lucky, the atoms in the beam and target fuse, creating a new atom with a bigger, bulkier nucleus, perhaps one holding more protons than any other known.
Researchers are using this strategy to go after elements 119 and 120. Scientists want to create such never-before-seen atoms to test how far the periodic table goes, to satisfy curiosity about the forces that hold atoms together and to understand what bizarre chemistry might occur with these extreme atoms.
The search is gearing up for the next superheavy elements, 119 and 120 (red boxes in the table below). Meanwhile, scientists are studying the known superheavy elements (blue) to better understand how such large atoms behave.

Coaxing nuclei to combine into a new element is done only at highly specialized facilities in a few locations across the globe, including labs in Russia and Japan. Researchers carefully choose the makeup of the beam and the target in hopes of producing a designer atom of the element desired. That’s how the four newest elements were created: nihonium (element 113), moscovium (115), tennessine (117) and oganesson (118) (SN Online: 11/30/16).
To create tennessine, for example, scientists combined beams of calcium with a target made of berkelium — once the berkelium finally made it through customs in Russia. The union makes sense when you consider the number of protons in each nucleus. Calcium has 20 protons and berkelium has 97, making for 117 protons total, the number found in tennessine’s nucleus. Combine calcium with the next element down the table, californium, and you get element 118, oganesson.
Using calcium beams — specifically a stable calcium isotope with a combined total of 48 protons and neutrons known as calcium-48 — has been highly successful. But to create bigger nuclei would take increasingly exotic materials. The californium and berkelium used in previous efforts are so rare that the target materials had to be made at Oak Ridge, where researchers stew materials in a nuclear reactor for months and carefully process the highly radioactive product that comes out. All that work might produce just milligrams of the material.
To discover element 119 using a calcium-48 beam, researchers would need a target made of einsteinium (element 99) which is even rarer than californium and berkelium. “We can’t make enough einsteinium,”…
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