New elements discovered
A rare event took place in June, when not one but two new elements were added to the periodic table. The heaviest elements yet discovered, these new entries have 114 and 116 protons in their nuclei, respectively. Although they have not yet received names the heaviest named element is currently copernicium, which has 112 protons their presence on the table was recognized by the Joint Working Party of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and its sister body in pure and applied chemistry. Officially speaking, these elements exist.
The same meeting of the Joint Working Party also reviewed the evidence for three other would-be elements in the table containing 113, 115 and 117 protons, respectively. Signs of these elements had been seen in experiments at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, and the results were published in the scientific literature. However, on this occasion, the committee decided not to formally acknowledge the existence of the elements until more definitive and cross-checking measurements could be performed.
The drive to produce and identify new elements and in the process redefine the limits of the periodic table is a frontier field of nuclear physics, but proving that a new element has been created is far from easy. Similar scientific challenges exist when the object of the experiment is to create nuclei where the ratio of neutrons (N) to protons (Z) is unusually high or low. Although these "exotic" nuclei are chemically identical to their more stable cousins and so occupy the same slots in the periodic table, their differing total masses can radically alter how their nuclei behave. Indeed, such nuclear species often live only fleetingly before they radioactively decay to more stable forms. But what these decay processes can do is provide valuable insights into the underlying structure of atoms. This helps us understand how protons and neutrons link together to form bulk nuclear matter, and thus how stable elements were originally created. A century after Ernest Rutherford's paper on the existence of the atomic nucleus, we are still gaining new insights into the mysteries of the nuclear world.
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