so there's been an exciting
development I heard about it last night
about elements 114 and
116 the international Union of chemistry
IUPAC has decided that the evidence for
the existence of these elements is now
Beyond Reasonable Doubt so they are
officially on the periodic
table
all the super heavy elements are made by
taking a heavy
element often one that is heavier than
uranium in this case for 114 it's the
element
plutonium which is
94 and then taking calcium which is
element
20 and accelerating the ion of calcium
at a terrific speed and letting it Bang
into into the target of plutonium once a
month so once a week very
rarely one of these millions or
trillions of atoms fuses so you get an
atom of element 114 the problem is then
to prove it the work on elements 114 and
116 were part of an international
collaboration between scientists in
Russia in the in dubna which to the
north of Moscow and American scientists
in the Lawrence Livermore lab in
California and they have come up with
some data and some years ago 2004 so
seven years ago they published papers
about these elements Brady who
likes forensic science and crime says
these you can imagine like witness
reports this is what the scientists saw
and they believe that this is really
good evidence that they have made the
elements what has happened since then is
that IUPAC has set up what they call a
joint working party to examine the
evidence rather like a law Court
examines the evidence for a
crime and what has happened the breaking
news is that this joint working party
has published a paper
here it is and it's in the journal pure
and applied chemistry which is the
official Journal of
IUPAC and what they have done is look at
the evidence for all the elements from
113 that's the one Beyond cerium right
up to 118 the end of the periodic table
or at least the end of that row of the
periodic table and they've examined them
all and have come to the conclusion that
the evidence is really strong as they
put it Beyond Reasonable Doubt for
elements
114 and
116 so now we can include those with
certainty in our periodic
tables in fact my coffee cup seems to
rather jump the gun and already they've
got 114 and
116 in color with holes around it I
don't know who it was that designed this
cup the evidence that the um working
party looks at is quite
complicated and I as a
chemist I'm a bit out of my depth here
but what they look at is the way that
the scientists detect the decays of
these atoms when they create an atom it
bangs into a Target and then sits in the
Target and begins to Decay and each time
it decays it goes from one element to
another gamma rays energetic waves given
out and these are detected so you can
see here the energy of the different
gamma rays that have been detected all
sorts of decays have been discovered for
elements from 113 up to 180
but so far the committee is really
convinced by the evidence for 114 and
116 what should we what about the others
oh it doesn't mean that they're wrong it
just means that there's still a bit of
doubt and people either need more time
to think about it or we need some more
experiments before we can be absolutely
certain so what's going to happen now to
114 and 116 at the moment these elements
have
the symbols uuq and
U which are essentially the Latin
for 14 and
116 and what will now happen is
that these elements all being well will
receive proper names I I presume that
the teams whose evidence has been
accepted will begin to think about names
though there may some delay before the
names come
up but what is certainly true is that
because this is made done by an
international
collaboration that there will not be any
nationalistic name and it will be used
to honor probably the name of one that's
a scientist I still quite like planium
as a name but my views are not important
here so these Decay chains a very
specialist you might expect that you
just see them in the paper if you been
watching carefully you'll see that I've
got tie with them on it and you can get
a tie with these Decay chains to
celebrate the discovery of some of these
elements where did that one come from
this one came from damat from the GSI
where
elements 112 110 108 were made and so
all being well there's going to be a new
tie for elements 114 and
116 and I hope I'll be given one of them
too