The search for new elements will become very difficult from now on

Discovering a new element and placing it on the periodic table is no longer as easy as it used to be.

Back in the 18th century, Antoine Lavoisier simply burned mercury oxide to become the first person to find oxygen. Today, it takes more than 100 scientists from 4 research groups, of 3 countries to work with giant particle accelerators, continuously bombarding atomic nuclei for years to find 4 integers. new element.

If you want to imagine this process, it's like playing a real lottery. A particle accelerator will cause two matter to collide, smashing their nucleus. Your chance in this game is one trillionth, when by some chance, two pieces of broken kernels can be combined into one. As long as the life of this new particle is one thousandth of a second, congratulations on finding the new element.

The discovery of a new element is becoming increasingly difficult.

That's how scientists find four new elements that fill the seventh line of the periodic table. Unnamed elements are classified as super heavy , their nuclei are so dense that they cannot exist in nature.

There will be more than 100 protons crowded in the nucleus of each element. Because they are positively charged, they will push each other so that this structure cannot be sustainable. Only in lighter elements, the weak nuclear force works by new neutrons that can stabilize the forces of the protons and make them easy to survive.

"Once you get larger nuclei, the density of particles will make them unable to keep themselves together," said Dawn Shaughnessy, head of the heavy element project at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. said. She is the one who writes her name in many discoveries of super-heavy elements and is co-discovering 4 new elements.

Dawn Shaughnessy works in an experiment.

The existence of super heavy elements is super rare , even if you put them in the great probability of the universe. " Maybe a supernova has held a super-heavy element in a millisecond or longer , " Shaughnessy said. But to find them right on Earth, the easiest lottery lottery tickets can only be purchased at particle accelerators, where scientists will build these elements by adding two nuclei of another element. together.

For example, to create the 117th element, Shaughnessy's colleagues had to smash calcium nuclei (atomic number 20) and Berkelenium (atomic number 97)."If you add two numbers you will get 117" , she said. "What we do is really just melt all the protons to put them together."

It will be very simple to say, but the process must be really tricky. You will work with a machine as large as a few buildings just to control particles 10-13mm in size. Atoms must be pushed at a sufficient force to break down the stability of the protons. On the other hand, they cannot be too strong, otherwise they will cause the nuclei to self-destruct each other.

A machine in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"There is a sensitive point for two nuclei to collide and merge," said Professor Paul Karol, chairman of the Union of Basic Chemistry and Applications (IUPAC). In order to know where this point is, scientists have to spend many years on complex experiments, using both theory, computational equations and computers to conjecture. Sometimes, they need luck.

Nuclear atoms are accelerated with giant machines until some collide. This takes months, even years, for a beautiful day, computers record special data. When a superheavy element is found, they must seize the opportunity for a thousandth of a second that it exists to evaluate the properties and compare it with prediction theories.

The elemental simulation image at position 117 is recorded.

Going back to the 4 elements that have filled the 7th row in the periodic table, they will make the opportunity for the next team to discover the new element to drop extremely low. Recall the story of Antoine Lavoisier burning mercury oxide and we need 100 scientists to work with particle accelerators to have a similar visualization.

If a scientist is still pursuing the work of completing the periodic table, they must start with it in the 8th row.

These will be extremely massive elements. This means that the surrounding electrons are transmitted enough energy to fly close to the speed of light.

Recall Einstein's theories, when an object approaches the speed of light, their mass and energy will be affected accordingly. Now, you will have to solve the problems of the quantum world."It will turn complicated things into extremely complex," Karol said.

The last problem, it seems that the principles of the periodic table are being broken by new elements. "Flerovi in ​​position 114 is a great example," Shaughnessy said. It is showing the properties of both metals and rare gases. Elements such as these make scientists themselves question the principles they set for the periodic table. For a high school student, it has no specific meaning. But for a chemist, it seems that the sacred spirit they worship is being overthrown.