Word: ghiorso
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...synthesis of element No. 106 was announced last week by a Berkeley team led by Physicist Albert Ghiorso and Chemist Glenn Seaborg, the former Atomic Energy Commission chairman who won a Nobel Prize for synthesizing element No. 94 (plutonium). The Berkeley scientists used a newly beefed-up particle accelerator called Super-HILAC (for heavy ion linear accelerator) to send nuclei of oxygen atoms barreling into another artificial element, californium. As occasional collisions occurred between the oxygen and californium nuclei, they fused and formed the heavier nucleus of element 106-but not for long. Like most artificial elements...
...Physicist Georgy N. Flerov, last June claimed a similar achievement using another technique: firing nuclei of chromium into lead. That produced a slightly different isotope of element 106 with an even shorter half-life of less than one-hundredth of a second. The Berkeley group was highly skeptical. Said Ghiorso: "The proof they presented is marginal. I think they are on shaky ground...
After setting up sophisticated detectors to monitor their results, a team ol physicists led by Albert Ghiorso used the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory's heavy-ion linear accelerator (HILAC) to shoot nitrogen 15 nuclei with an energy level of 84 million electron volts at a submicroscopic bit of californium 249. Although a constant stream of nuclei was directed at the target, only about six collisions per hour produced atoms of the new element...
Chemical Revolution. Ghiorso, Nuclear Chemist James Harris, Finnish Physicists Matti Nurmia and Kari Eskda, the same team that discovered element 104, suggested that the new element be named hahnium, in honor of Otto Hahn, the German chemist who in 1938 discovered nuclear fission. Ghiorso also took the occasion to disagree with a prior-and tentative -claim by Russian physicists that they had discovered element 105. The Lawrence team, he explained, had been unable to duplicate the Russian experiment, which used less sensitive equipment and produced uncertain results...
...theory, they should be so long-lived that traces of them may still exist in their natural state on earth and the moon (scientists are looking for them in the lunar rocks brought back by Apollo). If they are ever found or-more likely-produced in the laboratory, says Ghiorso, "it would revolutionize chemistry. It would be the most fantastic thing in my lifetime...