Word: elements
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...down a 100-yard corridor in a race. His opponents: a set of disintegrating atoms. Though it was quite unlike the procedure normally associated with the grave and careful laboratories of science, the race was crucial to the performance of that increasingly difficult feat-the identification of a new element. The story of how the 100-yard dash helped a team of international scientists create element 102 is told in SCIENCE, Chemists...
Creating new heavy elements is a scientific tour de force that gets harder and harder as the easier possibilities are knocked off the list. When Chemist Paul R. Fields of the Argonne National Laboratory got into the game last year, all the elements above uranium (No. 92 and nature's heaviest) through element No. 101 (mendelevium) had already been synthesized.*He knew that the next candidate, element No. 102, would be the toughest yet. Last week, in a joint release of Argonne, Britain's Harwell laboratory and Sweden's Nobel Institute for Physics, a U.S.-British-Swedish...
Overstuffed Atom. Fields and his colleague Arnold Friedman decided that the best bet would be to bombard curium with carbon ions in a cyclotron. This would be quite a trick; curium, element No. 96, is itself synthetic and intensely radioactive. If any of it were fattened into element 102, the fragile, overstuffed atoms would predictably disintegrate in a few minutes...
...cyclotron, the only one in operation capable of projecting a sufficiently intense beam of carbon ions. Milsted also undertook the tricky job of making curium into a thin film, and sandwiching it between aluminum foil to form a suitable target. The apparatus was arranged so that any atoms of element 102 formed would be knocked out of the target and would stick to a "catcher foil," a bit of plastic film...
Juggler Technique. Element 102 disintegrated so fast that a major problem was to prove that it had been created at all. The scientists developed a technique that would have done credit to a team of Japanese jugglers. After the curium had been bombarded for about 20 minutes, the Swedes shut down the cyclotron. As the concrete shield opened, a group of scientists, wearing gloves and dust masks against radioactivity, dashed into the cyclotron chamber. One snatched the target from the machine, another took it apart and passed it to a third, who extracted the catcher foil. The fastest runner, generally...