DOI: 10.1595/147106706X110817 The Discoverers of the Palladium Isotopes THE THIRTY-FOUR KNOWN PALLADIUM ISOTOPES FOUND BETWEEN 1935 AND 1997 By J. W. Arblaster Coleshill Laboratories, Gorsey Lane, Coleshill, West Midlands B46 1JU, U.K.; E-mail:
[email protected] This is the fourth in a series of reviews of circumstances surrounding the discoveries of the isotopes of the six platinum group elements. The first review, on platinum isotopes, was published in this Journal in October 2000, the second, on iridium isotopes, was published here in October 2003 and the third, on osmium isotopes, was published in October 2004 (1). The current review looks at the discovery and the discoverers of the thirty-four isotopes of palladium. Of the thirty-four known isotopes of palladium, ment activities found for palladium, such as a half- six occur naturally with the following authorised life of six hours discovered by Fermi et al. in 1934 isotopic abundances (2): (9) and half-lifes of 3 minutes and 60 hours discov- ered by Kurchatov et al. (10) in 1935 do not appear to have been confirmed. The Naturally Occurring Isotopes of Palladium In 1940, Nishima et al. (11) obtained an unspec- Mass number Isotopic abundance, % ified activity with a half-life of 26 minutes which is also likely to have been 111Pd. The actual half-life of 102Pd 1.02 111 104Pd 11.14 Pd is now known to be 23 minutes, so the differ- 105Pd 22.33 ent values obtained above are probably indicative 106 Pd 27.33 of calibration problems. 108 Pd 26.46 These unspecified activities raise problems con- 110Pd 11.72 cerning the precedence for treating each discovery in this paper.