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Nihonium the Obscure Iulia Georgescu Explains Her Fascination with the Elusive Element 113

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Nihonium the Obscure Iulia Georgescu Explains Her Fascination with the Elusive Element 113 in your element Nihonium the obscure Iulia Georgescu explains her fascination with the elusive element 113. onfused by the empty boxes at the the first nihonium atom by smashing bottom-right corner of the periodic bismuth-209 and zinc-70 nuclei. The atom Ctable, my friend and I bugged our decayed after a mere 0.34 milliseconds high-school chemistry teacher until she and the challenge was to identify it produced a newer version from a back through a forensic analysis of its decay cabinet. There, those boxes were filled products. Nihonium decays sequentially with obscure element symbols such as to dubnium-262 through four α-decays, Uut, Uuq or Uup, associated with near- which in turn further breaks down into unpronounceable latinized placeholder two smaller fragments. In 2005 the RIKEN names that simply stood in for the atomic team managed to identify the remains of numbers: Uut for ununtrium, which just another nihonium atom. means 1-1-3-ium, Uuq for ununquadium, To fully characterize the dubnium decay or 1-1-4-ium, and so on. None of this did chain the RIKEN team still had two α-decays anything to help illuminate us. We were to understand, from bohrium-266 to then sent away with a brief mention that dubnium-262 and lawrencium-258. For these were short-lived man-made elements this, they bombarded curium with a sodium created in a nuclear reactor. This not- beam to obtain bohrium and dubnium, and entirely-accurate explanation was rather once this process was clear they then ‘just’ unsatisfying. Undeterred, we went straight had to wait for another nihonium atom to the bookshop, purchased a periodic table to be generated. It took seven years and a poster, stuck it on the wall of my room and lot of patience, but in 2012 Morita’s team promptly proceeded to fill in the empty PHOTO STOCK / ALAMY SERVICE PRESS PACIFIC finally identified a chain of six α-decays boxes with new elements shamelessly from element 113, this time not to dubnium named after our ourselves, our surnames problematic cousin nipponium (named but further down to lawrencium-258 and germanized for good measure. after Nippon, synonym of Nihon). At the mendelevium-254. The existence of My career did not live up to my exalted beginning of the twentieth century the nihonium was finally nailed down. teenage expectations and unsurprisingly Japanese chemist Masataka Ogawa was Meanwhile, a Russian–US collaboration there is no element named after me, but years studying with William Ramsay in London. between the Dubna Joint Institute for Nuclear later I was working as a postdoc at RIKEN They suspected some new element could be Research and the Lawrence Livermore (Rikagaku Kenkyūsho, or the Institute of found in a mineral called thorianite. Ogawa National Laboratory had also identified Physical and Chemical Research) in Japan managed to isolate what was indeed a new element 113 as a decay product of element and met Kosuke Morita, who led the team element and published his results in 1909, 115, which they would name moscovium, that discovered element 113 — the Uut naming it nipponium — he had misidentified and made a discovery claim for these two that had intrigued me back in school. For it as element 43 (now technetium), however, elements. By 2005 the collaboration had a long time I had no idea that the jovial, when it was in fact element 75 (rhenium), strengthened their case for the observed unassuming man that I was regularly meeting right below it in the periodic table. Element decay, but the IUPAC still found the evidence at the Go club playing the popular strategy 43 was mistakenly claimed for another time insufficient and the discovery of element 113 board game was actually a well-known by German chemists Walter and Ida Noddack was attributed to the RIKEN team, who were superheavy element hunter. But this is not and Otto Berg, who all actually went on to given the privilege of naming it. the only reason I have a special affinity for discover rhenium in 1925 — completely Although it’s now been produced, element 113. I associate it with the exotic independently from Ogawa’s unrecognized identified and named, we still haven’t learned and sometimes misunderstood culture of its element. Finally, element 43 was an awful lot more about element 113 since my eponymous country. discovered — and correctly identified — by school years. Nihonium makes me think of Element 113 — named nihonium Emilio Segrè and Carlo Perrier in 1937. a Japanese Noh mask (pictured): mysterious (Nh) after Nihon, which means Japan in Nihonium’s discovery was perhaps less and somewhat disturbing. We don’t know Japanese — was the first element discovered dramatic, but element 113 was arguably what is hiding behind it; for example, in and correctly identified in Asia. We need far more difficult to spot and identify. In terms of its properties or behaviour, but “and correctly identified” because of its 2003 Morita’s team started looking for perhaps that is where its charm lies. ❐ superheavy elements at RIKEN’s heavy- ion linear accelerator. Just a year later IULIA GEORGESCU is the Chief Editor of they had already managed to synthesize Nature Reviews Physics. Ds Rg Cn Nh Fl Mc Lv Ts Og 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 1150 NATURE CHEMISTRY | VOL 9 | NOVEMBER 2017 | www.nature.com/naturechemistry ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. .
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