Transuranium element



This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2007)

In uranium).

Of the elements with atomic numbers 1 to 92, all but four (francium) occur in easily detectable quantities on earth, having stable, or very long half life isotopes, or are created as common products of the decay of uranium.

All of the elements with higher atomic numbers, however, have been first discovered artificially, and other than 239Pu).

Those that can be found on earth now are artificially generated island of stability.”

Transuranic elements that have not been discovered, or have been discovered but are not yet officially named, use IUPAC's systematic element names. The naming of transuranic elements is a source of controversy.

Discovery and naming of transuranium elements

The majority of the transuranium elements were produced by three groups:

  • A group at the University of California, Berkeley, under three different leaders:
    • Edwin Mattison McMillan, first to produce a transuranium element:
      • 93. uranium and Neptune follows Uranus in the planetary sequence.
    • Glenn T. Seaborg, next in order, who produced:
      • 94. plutonium, Pu, named after the dwarf planet Pluto, following the same naming rule as it follows neptunium and Pluto follows Neptune in the pre-2006 planetary sequence.
      • 95. europium, and so was named after the continent where it was first produced.
      • 96. radioactive elements.
      • 97. berkelium, Bk, named after the city of Berkeley, where the University of California at Berkeley is located.
      • 98. californium, Cf, named after the state of California, where the university is located.
    • Albert Ghiorso, who had been on Seaborg's team when they produced curium, berkelium, and californium, took over as director to produce:
      • 99. einsteinium, Es, named after the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.
      • 100. chain reaction.
      • 101. chemical elements.
      • 102. Alfred Nobel.
      • 103. lawrencium, Lr, named after Ernest O. Lawrence, a physicist best known for development of the cyclotron, and the person for whom the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (which hosted the creation of these transuranium elements) was named.
  • A group at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia (then the Soviet Union) who produced:
    • 104. atomic nucleus.
    • 105. dubnium, Db, an element that is named after the city of Dubna, where the JINR is located,
    • 106. Glenn T. Seaborg. This name caused controversy because Seaborg was still alive, but eventually became accepted by international chemists.
    • 107. atom.
  • A group at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Society for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany, under Peter Armbruster, who prepared:

List of the transuranic elements

*The existence of these elements has been confirmed, however the names and symbols given are provisional as no names for the elements have been agreed on.

Super-heavy atoms

 

Super-heavy atoms, (super heavy elements, commonly abbreviated SHE), are the rutherfordium (atomic number 104). They have only been made artificially, and currently serve no useful purpose because their short half-lives cause them to decay after a few minutes to just a few milliseconds, which also makes them extremely hard to study.

Super-heavy atoms have all been created during the latter half of the 20th century and are continually being created during the 21st century as technology advances. They are created through the bombardment of elements in a particle accelerator, for example the rutherfordium. These elements are created in quantities on the atomic scale and no method of mass creation has been found.

See also

References

    • http://web.fccj.org/~ethall/uranium/uranium.htm
     
    This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Transuranium_element". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.