🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE Scientists keep finding new pure units of matter — but it's getting ever harder.
Take a look around: Every single thing you see is made up of elements in the periodic table. Ever since scientists first cobbled together these catalogs of nature’s building blocks in the 19th century, they have wondered if there was any end to the elements and their variants, called isotopes. It’s a profound question at the heart of the physical universe.
Each new record-setting “superheavy” element tacked on to the periodic table gives us insight into natural laws and their limits. Meanwhile, isotopes — variants of an element with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei — can have distinct properties that make them scientifically and industrially valuable. For example, the most frequently used isotope for medical imaging is an isotope of technetium, the first element ever artificially synthesized in 1937.
This should afford new superheavy atoms much longer lifetimes than their rapidly decaying neighbors on the periodic table. Superheavy nuclei, by their fundamentally unstable and synthetic nature, behave in different and unpredictable ways compared with the nuclei of naturally occurring elements, so no one’s sure just where the island will be. But researchers think we’re close.
Pushing nature’s envelope could also shed light on the ultimate origins of matter in the Big Bang and stellar furnaces, how particles self-organize into discrete elements and more. “We’re trying to answer the fundamental question, ‘Where does matter end?’ ” says Shaughnessy. The most recent elemental advance came last year when nuclear scientists at the Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany bombarded a lump of 97-proton berkelium with a beam of 20-proton calcium ions. The result was a few atoms of the 117-proton element, which still awaits a formal name.
But to create new superheavies, SHE-Factory and other facilities are exploring new, more powerful beams and state-of-the-art particle detectors. From the start, SHE-Factory will unleash beams with 20 times the intensity of today’s best accelerators. The facility will also rely on new ultrasensitive instruments capable of spotting easily missed particles that continuously check data for superheavy element generation for months on end.
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