Nobelium

Notable characteristics

Little is known about nobelium and only small quantities of it have ever been produced. It has no known uses whatsoever outside of the laboratory. Its most stable electron capture.

History

Nobelium (named for half-life 55 seconds). Their work was confirmed by Soviet researchers in Dubna.

A year earlier, however, physicists at the Nobel Institute in Sweden announced that they had synthesized an half-life of 10 minutes at 8.5 MeV after bombarding ²⁴⁴Cm with ¹³C nuclei. Based on this report, the Commission on Atomic Weights of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry assigned and accepted the name nobelium and the symbol No for the "new" element. Subsequent Russian and American efforts to repeat the experiment failed.

In 1966 researchers at UC Berkeley confirmed the 1958 experiments and went on to show the existence of ²⁵⁴No (half-life 55 s), ²⁵²No (half-life 2.3 s), and ²⁵⁷No (half-life 23 s). The next year Ghiorso's group decided to retain the name nobelium for element 102.

Nobelium was the most recent element "of which the news had come to Harvard" when Tom Lehrer wrote "The Elements Song" and was therefore the element with the highest atomic number to be included.

Isotopes

13 radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 56 seconds. This element also has 1 meta state, ^254mNo (t_½ 0.28 seconds).

The known subatomic particles.

References

• Los Alamos National Laboratory - Nobelium
• Guide to the Elements - Revised Edition, Albert Stwertka, (Oxford University Press; 1998) ISBN 0-19-508083-1
• It's Elemental - Nobelium