I am sitting in the control room of the GSI Institute, the
control room of the linear accelerator that was used to create
element 111 and five of the other super-heavy elements. The
idea of this is that you have a metal target, usually lead or
bismuth, elements 82 or 83. And you take a lighter element,
say copper and bang the copper at huge velocity into the lead
or the bismuth, depending the element that you want to
make. The idea is that you have to accelerate them very fast
so that the two positively charged nuclei can come together.
But not so fast that you have a lot of energy and they
immediately fall apart again.
Ok, this is the periodic table of the elements that was used
for the christening of element 111 which was called
roentgenium. And you see you can remove this cube here and
Sigurd Hofmann the head of the group who discovered the
elements and our minister Annette Schavan together inserted
the cube into the periodic table of the elements and it actually
started to glow.
Oh it was an amazing day, we had a huge ceremony, 1000
people came here for the christening and afterwards there
was cake and champagne and it was really good.
Element 111 has a name which is really difficult to pronounce
- roentgenium which is named after Rontgen the discoverer
of x-rays. I just find that it is a combination of letters that
people in England find difficult to pronounce. However
Rontgen was, I believe, the first Nobel Prize winner or one of
the first Nobel Prize winners and so it is really quite fitting
that he should have an element named after him.
The first discovery was of three atoms, of this element and
then the experiments were repeated, and another three were
found, so it was relatively still relatively quite a small number,
but it is really important when somebody does a series of
these experiments that you have to repeat them to make
sure that you have really seen what you think you want. You
are really excited you want to make a new element and so it
is quite easy to fool yourself. Or sometimes people could be
tempted to cheat so you really have to repeat it. Ideally you
get a different lab in a different place using a different route
and if two people get the same results you are pretty sure.
But in this case I think the two runs were repeated here and
it was still a whole period of 10 or 12 years between the
discovery of the element and it being finally named. Because
people want to be absolutely sure that the data are correct.
The machines that makes these ions is enormous and it takes
a whole team of operators to control it. And all this stuff
behind me is to control the power, the voltages and so on,
and the different parts of the accelerator that takes the ion
beam to this tiny chamber. It is really only about this size,
where the actual experiment took place and once the atom is
made it then flies off to the detector that is two rooms away
down a long tube.
Yeah, of course we are waiting now for the final confirmation
to christen element 112 which is going to be copernicium, but
well we don’t know yet what we are going to do for the
christening. We are having discussions what we are going to
do and I think it will be a big surprise.