Livermorium

Livermorium is a synthetic chemical element; it has symbol Lv and atomic number 116. It is an extremely radioactive element that has only been created in laboratories and has not been observed in nature; about 35 livermorium atoms had been made as of 2020. The element is named after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, which collaborated with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, to discover livermorium during experiments conducted between 2000 and 2006. The name of the laboratory refers to the city of Livermore, California, where it is located, which in turn was named after the rancher and landowner Robert Livermore. IUPAC officially added it to the periodic table on June 1, 2011, and adopted the name on May 30, 2012. Six isotopes of livermorium are known, with mass numbers 288–293 inclusive; the longest-lived is livermorium-293 with a half-life of about 80 milliseconds. A seventh possible isotope with mass number 294 has been reported but not yet confirmed. In the periodic table, it is a p-block transactinide element. It is a member of the 7th period and is placed in group 16 as the heaviest chalcogen, but it has not been confirmed to behave as the heavier homologue to the chalcogen polonium. Livermorium is calculated to have some similar properties to its lighter homologues (oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium, and polonium), and be a post-transition metal, though it should also show several major differences from them.

Introduction

History

Unsuccessful synthesis attempts The first search for element 116, using the reaction between 248Cm and 48Ca, was performed in 1977 by Ken Hulet and his team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). They were unable to detect any atoms of livermorium. Yuri Oganessian and his team at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (FLNR) in the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) subsequently attempted the reaction in 1978 and met failure. In 1985, in a joint experiment between Berkeley and Peter Armbruster's team at GSI, the result was again negative, with a calculated cross section limit of 10–100 pb. Work on reactions with 48Ca, which had proved very useful in the synthesis of nobelium from the natPb+48Ca reaction, nevertheless continued at Dubna, with a superheavy element separator being developed in 1989, a search for target materials and starting of collaborations with LLNL beginning in 1990, production of more intense 48Ca beams beginning in 1996, and preparations for long-term experiments with 3 orders of magnitude higher sensitivity being performed in the early 1990s. This work led directly to the production of new isotopes of elements 112 to 118 in the reactions of 48Ca with actinide targets and the discovery of the 5 heaviest elements on the periodic table: flerovium, moscovium, livermorium, tennessine, and oganesson. In 1995, an international team led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany attempted to synthesise element 116 in a radiative capture reaction (in which the compound nucleus de-excites through pure gamma emission without evaporating neutrons) between a lead-208 target and selenium-82 projectiles. No atoms of element 116 were identified.

Unconfirmed discovery claims In late 1998, Polish physicist Robert Smolańczuk published calculations on the fusion of atomic nuclei towards the synthesis of superheavy atoms, including elements 118 and 116. His calculations suggested that it might be possible to make these two elements by fusing lead with krypton under carefully controlled conditions. In 1999, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory made use of these predictions and announced the discovery of elements 118 and 116, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, and very soon after the results were reported in Science. The researchers reported to have performed the reaction

8636Kr + 20882Pb → 293118Og + n → 289116Lv + α The following year, they published a retraction after researchers at other laboratories were unable to duplicate the results and the Berkeley lab itself was unable to duplicate them as well. In June 2002, the director of the lab announced that the original claim of the discovery of these two elements had been based on data fabricated by principal author Victor Ninov. The isotope 289Lv was finally discovered in 2024 at the JINR.

Discovery Livermorium was first synthesized on July 19, 2000, when scientists at Dubna (JINR) bombarded a curium-248 target with accelerated calcium-48 ions. A single atom was detected, decaying by alpha emission with decay energy 10.54 MeV to an isotope of flerovium. The results were published in December 2000.

24896Cm + 4820Ca → 296116Lv* → 293116Lv + 3 10n → 289114Fl + α The daughter flerovium isotope had properties matching those of a flerovium isotope first synthesized in June 1999, which was originally assigned to 288Fl, implying an assignment of the parent livermorium isotope to 292Lv. Later work in December 2002 indicated that the synthesized flerovium isotope was actually 289Fl, and hence the assignment of the synthesized livermorium atom was correspondingly altered to 293Lv.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.