Word: hilac
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...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, No. 106 is extremely unstable...
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...
...Called Hilac (heavy ion linear accelerator), the Berkeley machine is 112 ft. long and about 10 ft. in diameter. Instead of hurling protons, deuterons and other light bits of atomic chaff, it uses as its projectiles such comparatively heavy elements as nitrogen (atomic weight 14) and neon (atomic weight 20), which have effects that are different from those of smaller projectiles...
Berkeley's Hilac will be used chiefly for transmuting elements, especially for attempting to create new elements heavier than mendelevium (element 101). Another use: simulating the damage that may be done by heavy cosmic-ray particles to the living cells of space travelers above the sheltering atmosphere...
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