RUSSIA: US and Russian researchers say they have created element 118, the heaviest known element. It is the fifth ultra-heavy element produced by the team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.
Although they produced only three atoms of element 118 and each lasted for less than one-thousandth of a second, the team said there was less than one chance in 10,000 there was a mistake.
A team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, announced in 1999 that it had created element 118 by a different route. However, those results were shown to have been fabricated by physicist Victor Ninov, who was later fired.
"We selected a completely different nuclear reaction, performed with completely different people in a different laboratory," said physicist Ken Moody of Livermore, who led the American team. "Everything we do is checked and double-checked."
The findings were published yesterday in the journal Physical Review C.
The discovery has no immediate application, but it brings researchers closer to discovering a group of ultra-heavy elements that may survive minutes or even hours, compared with the fractions of a second now seen.
Element 118 would fall directly below radon in the periodic table of the elements and is thus expected to be a so-called "noble gas".
Only 92 elements exist in nature, but physicists have produced 18 more. - (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)