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Bloomberg Businessweek / SEPTEMBER 2, 2019THE ELEMENTSS
o here we are, at the edge of chemistry: atomic No. 118,
oganesson, the coda of the periodic table as it stands and
the spot where questions of science shade into those of
philosophy. Is an element really an element if it exists nowhere
in nature—if it can be engineered only in a lab for a fraction of
a second before it blinks out of existence? Is “discovery” the
right word for such a feat? How far can scientists extend the
table by mashing lighter elements into each other to create
heavier ones? Is it even worth the time and trouble to do it just
to add a square?
One place to find answers to these questions is on Cyclotron
Road, a calf-busting walk up a hill above the University of
California at Berkeley campus. For decades, the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory’s tremendous accelerators—
which hosted within their guts the collisions and combina-
tions of high-energy particles—produced a parade of elements
the world had never known: 15 of them, including every ele-
ment save one from atomic No. 93 through 106. They came to
be called superheavies, though this was always an imprecise
term, referring variously to elements above 92, or above 100,
or above 103.
Even in their nomenclature, Berkeley cornered the glory.
Two superheavies were called lawrencium and seaborgium,
named after Ernest Lawrence and Glenn Seaborg, Berkeley’s
titans of nuclear physics, who’d built the university’s acceler-
ators and deployed them to study the heaviest elements of the
periodic table. Two others were called californium and berke-
lium, prompting a New Yorker wisecrack that, by not naming
another pair “universitium” and “ofium,” Berkeley had squan-
dered its chance at true immortality.
But then the parade stopped. The last new element synthe-
sized at Berkeley was seaborgium in 1974. Announcements of
fresh superheavy discoveries were now made by labs in Dubna,
Russia; Darmstadt, Germany; and Saitama, Japan. The science
changed, and it seemed as if Berkeley wasn’t even trying to
catch up. The expense of making elements climbed into the mil-
lions of dollars—money that could never be recouped, because
most superheavies don’t remain stable long enough to be com-
mercially viable. Funding withered away; once, while building
an ion separator out of spare parts, scientists fashioned a valve
out of a mousetrap spring. Some of the university’s accelera-
tors were decommissioned. One was replaced by a parking lot.
In the late 1990s a Berkeley team pushed one final time
beyond the boundary of the periodic table, even declared
that it had stumbled upon 118—only for the data to be exposed
as one man’s scientific fraud. And that was that. Its scientists
joined others pursuing new elements elsewhere, but in their
own particle accelerators, they applied themselves only to
investigating the known superheavies. Among the half-dozen
or so major institutions engaged in this work, Berkeley alone
has decided to stop chasing the tail of the table altogether.N
othing in science is the same blend of mundane arith-
metic and mystical alchemy as the manufacture of new
elements. The protons in an atom’s nucleus determine
its atomic number and thus its identity as an element. Melding
the atoms of different elements will produce a heavier ele-
ment, its atomic number predictably just the sum of those of
the lighter ingredients. To synthesize seaborgium (106 protons),you might fuse chromium (24 protons) with lead (82 protons) or
oxygen (8 protons) with californium (98 protons). A first grader
could do those sums. She might not know, though, that unit-
ing two atoms of iodine (53 protons) or other elements of sim-
ilar size requires unachievable power, or that it’s best to use a
lighter atom as a missile trained upon a heavier target. To deter-
mine which reaction has the healthiest chance of success, and
to calculate the speeds at which the atoms must collide, and
to then rev up a particle accelerator and establish those condi-
tions of screaming energy and infinitesimal precision, and to
thus forge an element that’s never appeared in the history of
the universe, or has perhaps only briefly materialized in the
core of a distant star—that feels like an act of cosmic creation.
There’s still a particle accelerator at Berkeley that dates
to the heyday of its search for new elements: a cyclotron
with a chamber 88 inches in diameter, built in 1962 and set
deep within a building on 1 Cyclotron Rd. Berkeley only man-
ages the cyclotron. It’s always been the property of the U.S.
government—first of the Atomic Energy Commission and then
of its successor, the Department of Energy. Anyone who wants
to meet Jacklyn Gates must make an appointment, present an
ID to the guards manning the boom gate across the road, walk
to the door of the building, call her on a house phone, and
wait for her to come down and open the door.
As a staff scientist in the heavy-element chemistry program,
Gates uses the cyclotron as her chief instrument, designing tests
and running them for weeks. I visited her in May, the day before
the cyclotron was going to be booted up for a week and a half
of experiments on mendelevium, element 101. A helium ion,
with its two protons and two neutrons, would be fired at a nib-
ble of einsteinium (element 99) smeared on metal foil, and the
two would then combine into any of the 16 isotopes of men-
delevium. The isotopes all hold 101 protons, but their atomic
masses differ because they have varying numbers of neutrons.
“We’re looking at a couple of different isotopes to see whether
or not their masses have been properly assigned,” Gates said.
She led me through 10-foot-thick concrete walls into the
steampunk heart of the cyclotron: wires and tubes and display
lights everywhere, pipes leading from chamber to chamber,
giant magnets to accelerate the ions to a third of the speed of
light and then to bend and guide them toward their targets.
The air was filled with a constant, almighty whirring.
Gates came to Berkeley for a Ph.D. in 2004, so she missed
the fraud scandal that exploded in the late ’90s. Victor Ninov,
a Bulgarian scientist who’d helped find elements 110, 111, and
112 at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in
Darmstadt, had been hired away by Berkeley in 1996 to be a
shining talent in the team’s renewed quest for new elements.
The university had acquired a sophisticated separator, an appa-
ratus to pick out the stray superheavy atom formed amid the
trillions of particles tearing around in an experiment. Ninov
coded software to analyze the data spilling out of the cyclotron,
and in 1999, after a project of bombarding a lead target with
krypton, his program revealed the formation of element 118.
Berkeley made the announcement in jubilation; it signaled
a return to the fruitful years of Lawrence and Seaborg. The
International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry (IUPAC),
which vets such findings, waited for further confirmations, but
other labs failed to replicate the experiment. When Berkeley’s