Four Elements Earn Permanent Seats on the Periodic Table

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/four-elements-earn-permanent-seats-periodic-table

Four Elements Earn Permanent Seats on the Periodic Table
U.S., Russian and Japanese scientists credited with official discoveries
By Andrew Grant / 4:58pm, December 31, 2015


FEWER U’S  The official discovery of elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 means that all 118 elements in the periodic table’s first seven rows have been found on Earth or produced in the lab. The four new elements will soon get names replacing the temporary “Uu” placeholder names.

The seventh row of the periodic table is officially full.

On December 30, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced that a Russian-U.S. collaboration had attained sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118. IUPAC awarded credit for the discovery of element 113 to scientists at RIKEN in Wako, Japan (SN Online: 9/27/12). Both groups synthesized the elements by slamming lighter nuclei into each other and tracking the decay of the radioactive superheavy elements that followed.

Researchers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which are among the institutions credited with elements 115, 117 and 118, had also laid claim to element 113 after experiments in 2004 (SN: 2/7/04, p. 84) and 2007. But garnering recognition for the three other elements softened the blow, says Dawn Shaughnessy, who leads the experimental nuclear and radiochemistry group at Livermore. “I’m personally very happy with IUPAC’s decision,” she says.

Published reports on the newly recognized elements will appear in early 2016, says IUPAC executive director Lynn Soby. Official recognition of the elements means that their discoverers earn the right to suggest names and symbols. Element 113 will be the first element discovered and named by researchers in Asia.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Jan. 1, 2016, to correct the abbreviation of strontium (Sr, #38) in the image of the periodic table.

Citations
IUPAC. Discovery and assignment of elements with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118. Press release issued December 30, 2015.

Further Reading
R. Ehrenberg. Japanese lab lays claim to element 113. Science News Online, September 27, 2012.
P. Weiss. Two new elements made: Atom smashups yield 113 and 115. Science News, Vol. 165, February 7, 2004, p. 84.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/science/element-number-113-name-periodic-table-japan.html

The New York Times / Science
In a First, Element Will Be Named by Researchers in Japan
By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR / JAN. 4, 2016


Kosuke Morita of the Riken institute in Japan led the team with the strongest claim to having discovered element 113 on the periodic table. Credit Kyodo News, via Associated Press

Since the 19th century, European and American discoveries have monopolized the naming of elements on the periodic table. It is evident in entries like francium, germanium, scandium, polonium, europium, californium, berkelium and americium.

But now, for the first time, researchers in Asia will make an addition to chemistry’s most fundamental catalog.

Scientists from the Riken institute in Japan will bestow an official name on Element 113, currently known by the placeholder name ununtrium, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced last week.

The organization said that studies published by the Japanese scientists from 2004 to 2012 give the team the strongest claim to having discovered the element. The declaration comes more than 12 years after the Japanese team first attempted to synthesize the superheavy element, by firing beams of zinc at a thin bismuth film.

Led by Kosuke Morita, the group began to bombard bismuth atoms in a particle accelerator at 10 percent the speed of light in 2003. A year later, they successfully fused two atomic nuclei from these elements, creating their first nucleus of Element 113, but it decayed in less than a thousandth of a second. In 2005, the team produced Element 113 in a second event, but the chemistry union did not consider the demonstration strong enough to denote a discovery.

“For over seven years, we continued to search for data conclusively identifying Element 113, but we just never saw another event,” Dr. Morita said in a statement. “I was not prepared to give up, however, as I believed that one day, if we persevered, luck would fall upon us again.”

In 2012, the team finally produced strong evidence that they had synthesized Element 113. Over the course of those nine years, the beam was active for 553 days and launched more than 130 quintillion zinc atoms, according to Nature.

The chemistry union, along with the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, granted the Riken researchers naming rights to Element 113 over a joint Russia-United States team that had also claimed to discover the element.

The chemistry union’s decisions are detailed in two reports to appear in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry. In addition to Element 113, Elements 115, 117 and 118 will also receive official names. Teams from Russia and the United States discovered those elements.

With their discovery, the bottom row of the periodic table will be complete. Elements are numbered by the protons they have in their nucleus, and Elements 114 (flerovium) and 116 (livermorium) had previously been confirmed and named.

Dr. Morita has not yet announced what he intends to name Element 113, but according to a 2004 article in The Japan Times when the team first published its results, one likely contender may be “japonium.”

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What Would You Name a New Element?

Imagine that you could name a new element on the periodic table. Send your ideas to scitimes@nytimes.com with a 50-100 word explanation. Before your imagination gets away, consider these published guidelines for new elements (For linguistic consistency, the names of all new elements should end in “-ium”). In keeping with tradition, elements are named after:

• A mythological concept or character (including an astronomical object);
• A mineral, or similar substance;
• A place or geographical region;
• A property of the element; or
• A scientist.

[Unorthodox]

Unorthodoxium of course. 

(Seriously what's with all the un_______________ names?)