Element 113 is the only one that I
discussed with an ambassador. In fact
it's the only one I discussed with two
ambassadors because I've discussed it
with both, the old and the new japanese
ambassador to London. And the reason why I
was discussing, is because element 113 is
the first element to be definitely
synthesized in Japan. And so it is a huge
excitement in the country. I was in Tokyo
in February this year, 2016. And I met a
representative of Riken - the lab where
these elements were synthesized and they
gave me a press release about the
element. The really exciting thing from
their point of view is that they get to
choose the name of this element.
Now you have to understand that making these
so-called super heavy elements is not a quick process.
It's not like boiling things up in the test tube, or...
And finding a new element. It takes years and
years and years and over the history of
the search for elements, the last 200
years, there have been hundreds of claims
by people believing that they have
discovered new elements.
So now the process is extremely rigorous and now
they've got to the final stage and the
name has been chosen. The name they chose
was Nihonium, which is a latinized
version of the japanese name for Japan, Nihon.
I'm sure I pronounce that incorrectly.
The experiments that led to this
discovery began a long time ago, more
than 12 years ago. And like all elements
of this part of the periodic table,
they're made by taking a heavy element.
In this case bismuth, atomic number
83, and the light elements,
this case is zinc, accelerating the zinc to
a huge speed and the nuclei fuse
together to make an element of 113.
What you have to realize is
that you take billions and billions and
perhaps trillions of zinc atoms to get
one atom of element 113.
Apparently the Japanese lab observed
three atoms over a period of nine years.
So this is not something that you do
quickly on the Friday afternoon and
publish the next day. A huge amount of
verification is needed to make sure that
what you see is genuine and the way that
you detect these elements is that once
they formed they shoot out the back of
the bismuth target onto a detector and
then they decay radioactively into a
chain of different elements and this
chain of elements tells you which
element you formed, because soon you get
to part of the periodic table where you
know how the elements decay.
What is amazing though is that people can also
tell a little bit about the chemistry of
these elements. You can only do a limited
amount of chemistry when you have one atom at a time,
but what they can do is to bounce
the element, the atom, when it's ejected
off some sort of surface, say gold or Teflon,
and see if there's any difference
between the way they stick. You can tell
quite a bit about the element just from
the sticking. And in fact their
measurements have been made and element
113 does stick to gold quite strongly.
This part of the periodic table is really
unusual because just by chance the way
the atomic numbers add up, the number of
the element 113 is the same as the group
it's in at least the 13 it's
in Group 13 the same element as boron.
And if you go down element 113, Nihonium
is just below thallium. And we know
quite a lot about the chemistry of thallium,
particularly it's very poisonous.
Now you can't tell whether the nihonium
will be poisonous because you only have one atom.
Even if you could get one atom
inside somebody it would not poison them
chemically though it's radioactive decay
could cause damage. One of the things
that's really interesting about thallium
is that it has three electrons in its
outer shell and in its chemistry it can
lose either one of these to make thallium plus
or it can lose all three and
I suspect that in the chemistry
of element 113 the +1 state would be
even more prominent than in the
chemistry of thallium, because if you go
out the periodic table in the same group
to aluminium you don't get aluminium
plus at all.
Nihonium is in the same group so it has
three outer electrons in just the same
way as thallium, assuming that the
electrons are arranged in the same
configuration, because when you get to
these large atoms their energy levels of
the different shells are very close
together so we would be possible in
least in theory for the configuration to
be different, but people assume that it
will be three electrons arranged in the
same way as in boron, but much larger shell.
The difficulties that as the atoms
get bigger, and if you imagine the
electron like a particle they have to go
round and round in the shell and the
speeds they're going around approach the
speed of light, and therefore their mass
changes and you get so-called relativistic effects.
We made the video about this on the properties of mercury.
Which is much lighter element, than element 113.
So people will have to do quite a lot of calculations and in the end
unfortunately these will just be theory because
will be very difficult to verify them.
Now, the important question that people
always else is what in earth is the
point of making elements like this.
And the answer is that it gives us a much
better understanding of how the protons
and the neutrons in the nucleus bind together,
and it's only when you look at
the extremes when they are finding
together relatively weekly that you can
test with your theories are any good.
So although it's an enormously expensive experiment
the results are really very useful.
[Brady] Professor, we're not already know enough about how protons and neutrons work.
I mean, we can make atom bombs and nuclear energy,
we understand the every day elements very well.
What do we need to know more?
Why we not got ahead around...
The radium nucleus through off an alpha particle
consisting of two protons and two neutrons.
The importance of these experiments is that there have been
predictions that when you get very heavy elements.
The so-called super-heavy elements.
They may become more stable
than one might expect. In general what
has been found as people have gone up to
high heaven heavy and nuclei, they become
less and less stable. But now there is
some indication that these very heavy
elements are more stable than one might expect.
That doesn't mean they're very
stable they may only last a small
fraction of a second, but that's longer
than people might have expected just by
extrapolating the lifetimes of the other ones.
I think it's a great honor to
anybody to any country and I think it is
a very nice example of collaboration
between different countries because
although it was discovered in Japan its
existence was verified and justified by
experiments in Germany and Russia.
So it's a very good example of international collaboration.
I find the name slightly difficult to pronounce but
it's a lot better than roentgenium,
which I find almost impossible to pronounce.
This is the press release
and on the back is a photo of the
leader of the team professor Morita
with presumably the periodic table showing his element.
But the thing I really like is the quotation at the end.
It says "For Morita, then, part of the
coming year will be devoted to thinking
of and proposing a formal name, they've
not done that, but he's looking forward
to the next step in his research.
We plan now to look to the uncharted territory of element 119 and beyond.
Aiming to examine the chemical properties of the
elements in the seventh and eighth row of the periodic table.
And someday to discover the island of stability.
So, all being well there'll be lots more
periodic videos on the subject.
Oh, I'm wearing a Japanese happi, which
was given to me in Tokyo by a great fan
Nagayasu Nawa, and you can see
unfortunately element 113 comes here in my armpit.
It's a really nice periodic table and
it's even better on the back.
Walk along and see where the ions go.
By the time we get to here, the ions
already traveling at five percent of the speed of light.
Hits the targets here and
the wheel rotates is about 1000 revolutions per minute.