Day 90: Livermorium

^{Clockwise from top-left: the city of Livermore and location of livermorium’s discovery (from Wikimedia Commons); Robert Livermore, rancher and landowner whose land became the city of Livermore (from the Livermore Heritage Guild through Wikimedia Commons); livermorium as it appears on the periodic table.}

Another element that was synthesised in my lifetime, livermorium was first created in the year 2000. You will all be unsurprised to hear that there is not an awful lot of applications for this element, as it is superheavy and does not stick around long (the most stable isotope has a half life of 60 milliseconds). But hey, it’s an element so here’s a slightly shorter post on livermorium.

Element 116 was first attempted in the 1970s and continued right through the remainder of the 20th century. The experiments usually involved curium being bombarded with calcium, and were happening in the United States at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in the Soviet Union/Russia, and at GSI in Germany. Things started to pick up in 1990 when the labs began collaborating more after the Transfermium Wars, with more intense forms of calcium bombardment being invented and put to use.

After some unconfirmed claims of producing element 116, the breakthrough came through in 2000 at JINR. The curium bombardment with calcium led to one atom of element 116 being made. Experiments to confirm this continued through 2001-2006, with more isotopes of element 116 being made, and the number of atoms being produced still miniscule (around 12 including that first one in 2000). Finally in 2011, IUPAC concluded that over the last decade, element 116 had truly been discovered and the name livermorium was given to honour the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. JINR apparently were calling for moscovium originally, but that got given to element 115 instead. In a sort-of cheating way, this element was kind of named after Robert Livermore, who was the landowner that owned the land that became the city of Livermore in the 19th century.

An aerial photograph of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. From energy.gov.

And that’s livermorium: the result of cross-continental collaboration and named after an old rancher!