A lot of new radioactive isotopes have been discovered in Japan

Japanese physicists, in Physicsworld, reported in July 2010 that the list of known nuclear numbers was further extended with 45 new neutron-rich isotopes. These nuclei are formed in RIKEN's laboratory by firing a powerful beam of heavy ions into Berylium and Lead steles.

RIKEN is an acronym for the Institute of Natural Science Research, a large and famous scientific center of Japan, founded in 1917 with 3,000 scientists working in 7 scattered locations in the country. It rises. In it, the main facility is Wako located on the outskirts of Tokyo.

The big BigRIPS machine has found 45 new radioisotopes.

45 isotopes discovered in RIKEN are radioisotopes. It is also necessary to recall a known concept: A chemical element, such as Iron (Fe chemical symbol), Copper (Cu), etc., consists of many isotopes with the same number of Z atoms and different numbers of neutrons N, among them both radioisotopes and stable isotopes. Other radioisotopes with stable isotopes are more or less than neutrons compared to stable isotopes, which in turn will decay to become more stable nuclei.

Physicists at RIKEN, since the 1980s, began creating radioactive isotopes on their early accelerator. From an initial particle accelerator, RIKEN built and put into operation a big machine called the 'Huge' Radionuclide Beam Factory (RIBF or BigRIBF) worth up to half a billion USD. There are several similar factories in the world, but only in RIKEN is the first device of this type actually starting to operate.

BigRIBF's large machine works as follows: some cyclotrons are connected to each other to accelerate the nucleus of any element, from light hydrogen (H) to the heaviest is uranium (U). The particles, after being accelerated, fired at Berylium or Lead steles, the bombardment process or the division reaction occurred that resulted in a series of new, unstable neutron-rich nuclei, which were then collected, sort and analyze thanks to a superconducting device.

Thanks to the BigRIBF machine, the number of new radioisotopes has increased. Furthermore, many of the properties of these new nuclei, such as lifetime, mass, radiated spectrum, etc. are also determined, extending the understanding of the structure and origin of atomic nuclei. .

Indeed. Immediately after launching in 2007, RIKEN scientific groups, including foreigners (Germany, Russia, Vietnam, etc.), with experiments performed on BigRIBF's U-238 bullets, have discovered get two new isotopes of Palladium.

Japanese scientists continued to improve the accelerator system, increasing the intensity of accelerating beams up to 50 times, and in November 2008 conducted the second experiment, more massive and 4 days and nights long. During the next year and a half, the team of researchers carefully analyzed all the data obtained from nuclear reactions that occurred in the experiment. The result is a large 'batch' of 45 new isotopes that have never been known before.

Of the 45 new radioisotopes, particularly palladium-128 isotopes were found. This is very interesting, because this isotope plays an important role in astrophysics research.

Along with palladium-128, nickel-79 isotope is also detected. Both of these new types of nuclei create another theoretically attractive structure. The palladium-128 nucleus has neutron 'magic' numbers N = 82, so it must be much more durable than nuclei with more or less neutrons. Nickel-79 has a number of neutrons 51, which is the only neutron outside the neutron layers filled with 50 particles. This 51th excess "neutron" must be weakly attached to the nucleus, and nickel-79 must be very unstable. Therefore, the aforementioned two isotopes have a special meaning, which can be used to assess the correctness of the nuclear class pattern.

In addition, the researchers also said that with 45 new 'radioactive' radioisotopes, thousands of other isotopes will continue to be born, from which humanity will have a deeper understanding of processes in the universe, about the structure of the physical world, and creating new developments in the field of medical technology to serve people.

Similar massive machines are also being built in Europe and the United States. The FAIR project at the GSI center in Darmstadt (Germany) and the RIBF system at the University of Michigan (USA) also have great programs, not only on nuclear physics, but also on atomic physics, plasma physics and objects. hadron physics or elementary particles.