yeah so this is seaborgium which I have
a periodic table here it'd probably be
helpful if I point it out to you it's
right down here more or less in the
middle but very much towards the bottom
and this is in a row of elements that
are really quite special because these
guys come after the lanthanides and
actinides which these two rows down here
and these elements are special because
they don't hang around very long
these elements are actually really
unstable and they decay this is
radioactivity at work so if you want to
do anything with these you've got to
actually make the elements you can't
just go to a chemical company and buy a
jar of them you've actually got to make
them and then you've got to turn them
into a compound that you're interested
in and analyze it very very quickly and
some of these elements they can come and
go within 8 10 15 seconds minutes
they really don't hang around you've
made them what you want to do with them
well the answer could be let's make some
interesting molecules out of them that
we can study and therefore learn about
some of the properties that these
elements have because of the minute
because there's so little known about
them because a they're very difficult to
make and even if you do make them they
come and go so quickly we don't have
expect very much
experimental evidence to help to
validate the theoretical models we've
got and the theories are really great
but we need to know that they're
accurate and so for example seaborgium
should be very similar to analogous
group six metals higher up like tungsten
molybdenum and chromium these are very
well known quite well understood
elements you can make nice stable
compounds out of them that will hang
around for weeks months and years and
you expect certain periodic trends to
occur as you go down that group from
chromium to limiting them to tungsten
and the question is what then happens
when you go to the really super heavy
seaborgium in the next row down and so
you can predict what you might expect
but what you need to do is go out and do
some experiments to help validate that
theory so the news is that of a search
team prepared some seaborgium and this
is a really elegant reaction they take
some curium which is element number 96
and they smash some neon into it which
is element number 10 and that gives you
together element 106 which is seaborgium
now the clock's ticking because already
they're going to start to fall to bits
and so the answer is well the question
was what are you going to do and this
particular piece of research is really
elegant because what it does is it
generates the seaborgium atoms and very
quickly reacts them with carbon monoxide
and the thing about carbon monoxide is
it can bond to metal atoms in fact this
is one of the reasons why carbon
monoxide is not good for humans if you
inhale it it sticks on to the iron in
your hemoglobin and stops oxygen being
transported around your body but in this
case this has been used to our advantage
that you can make a seaborgium with six
carbon monoxides bonded to it and this
is really helpful because now it turns
out that this molecule is volatile and
because it's volatile you can get it
into the gas phase quickly whip it off
to a detector and then confirm that
you've made it so the reason it's
important is it's a volatile compound
that you can examine and you would
expect it to be very similar to the
analogous chromium molybdenum and
tungsten carbonyls and importantly
they've been known for many decades and
we understand their properties very well
and indeed earlier today we were just
subliming some group six metal carbonyls
just to show how they go from being a
solid into the gas phase
and then they come back out again as a
lovely crystalline solid and you would
expect the seaborgium carbonyl to be
just like this the problem is you can't
make anywhere near as much of the
seaborgium carbonyl and it doesn't hang
around long enough to go and put it in a
jar so the idea behind the project is
that you make the analogous molybdenum
and tungsten systems in situ on the same
system and then when you do it with
seaborgium you know what you're looking
for and through a very interesting and
advanced to have arrays the very elegant
work you can then detect the seaborgium
carbonyl coming out of this system where
you've made the atoms of seaborgium
added the carbon monoxide and then fired
it down to a detector so they've got a
bank of detectors which they have to
calibrate and they do all sorts of
control experiments my understanding is
one of the ways they were looking out to
make sure they had the seaborgium is
that seaborgium decays through a certain
number of processes which I think are
fairly well understood and you can
predict and this series of
transformations shows up in the
detectors and nothing like that can
happen when there's no seaborgium around
so if it does occur you know it has to
be down to the seaborgium I can easily
understand the reason to create a
molecule involving seaborgium in order
to test the theories of what will happen
where theories correct
harder to understand perhaps is why it's
even worth having good solid theories of
what seaborgium will do because
seaborgium will always be something that
falls apart and doesn't exist for very
long so do we need a huge wealth of
knowledge about it's not like it's going
to help other chemists because no one
can work with this thing anyway now I
disagree with you there
actually I think it does help other
chemists because part actually the
theory aspect you can't overstate how
important that is because we are only as
good as our understanding of the natural
world around us and that's a bit like
saying Mars is a long way away and so
therefore I don't
what goes on there you should care what
goes on there because it will inform you
about the basic principles and the laws
that our universe operates under and so
in when you read the paper about this
Seaborg carbonyl there's a discussion
about how well the carbon monoxide bond
to the metal and will it be stronger or
weaker than the analogous chromium
molybdenum and tungsten systems now this
is really important because remember
I've already said carbon monoxide will
bond to iron and poison you we need to
understand how these types of molecules
do interact with these metal centers
because this informs our understanding
of chemistry in a much broader context
so although it seems like a really
specialist very unusual thing that no
one would care about it's actually got
quite profound implications for our
broader understanding of chemistry
finally I guess finally it got approved
in 1997 and it got approved soon enough
so Seaborg could stand at the periodic
table like this and point to his element
and we were so happy that he was still
alive and could point here this is
seaborgium