82
or so elements that existed, not one had been discovered
in Asia.”
Like heavy-element labs everywhere, Haba’s team had to
share accelerator time with companies manufacturing radio-
active isotopes for medical use or researchers studying dif-
ferent elements. In all, across nine years, just 200 days were
allotted to the nihonium experiments.
Matthias Schädel, who was a nuclear chemist at GSI for
almost four decades until 2010, remembers the frustrations
well. First, he had to persuade colleagues to collaborate, and
then he had to apply for funding and for time with the acceler-
ator. “Sometimes this preparatory phase takes several years,”
he says. When a beam of projectile ions finally begins to shoot
toward its target, the scientists’ work enters a monotonous rou-
tine: checking settings, monitoring the beam. His colleagues
read journals or novels in between casting an eye over the data
cascading down a computer screen. It got tiring, particularly
by the time “the nth night shift in a several-weekslong experi-
ment” rolled around. What jolted you wide awake, he says, was
if the data suddenly revealed an “event”—an unusual nuclear
reaction that might, after weeks and weeks of further analysis,
turn out to be the signature of an unfamiliar element. Schädel
pulled plenty of these night shifts, but he was never part of the
discovery of a new element.
Given these steep investments of time and funds, Gates won-
ders if the search is always worth it. “In the amount of beam
time it takes to make a new element, you could learn a ton
about the superheavies that we’ve already made.” Of course,
she said, students don’t learn who gauged the ionization poten-
tial of lawrencium; they learn who first made the element. “So
if you want to make a bigger impact in public, you would make
a new element, because that’s a much flashier experiment. The
politics starts driving it instead of the search for science.”T
he periodic table was never expected to furl out end-
lessly. In these extreme reaches of the table, cramming
proton after proton into a nucleus renders it more and
more precarious. The positive charges repel one another until
the nucleus decays near-instantly—before electrons have had
a chance to settle into orbit to provide an atomic structure and
before the passage of a hundred-trillionth of a second, the time
an atom must exist to count as a new element. Were you to
reach element 173, scientists theorize, matters could get even
stickier. The effects of Einsteinian relativity would kick in, and
electrons would behave in peculiar ways. Those atoms may
not even be atoms as we know them—their electron clouds dis-
solving and the regular periodicity of their properties swerv-
ing wildly off course.
But physics presents difficulties long before 173. Even for
119, waiting just offstage, scientists aren’t sure which two
elements they might fuse. Oganesson, No. 118, was the prod-
uct of an especially stable isotope of calcium slamming into
californium. But that calcium can’t just be directed toward
einsteinium, the next element after californium; a handful
of nuclear reactors around the world generate only a mil-
ligram or so of einsteinium for research every year. Seven
years ago at GSI, Christoph Düllmann and his team tried a
combination of titanium (22 protons) and berkelium (97 pro-
tons), without results. In Japan, Haba has been working withvanadium (23 protons) and curium (96 protons). In a $60 mil-
lion Superheavy Element Factory in Dubna, inaugurated in
March, scientists are pelting berkelium with an extra-stable
titanium isotope, its nucleus fat with six neutrons more than
standard titanium. But at the moment, Düllmann says, 118
“is the end of the story. We have no idea what combination
of elements is best for 119 and 120. The number of theories
is the same as the number of theorists you talk to.”
The theorists agree that 119 and 120 are probably within
reach. Elements tend to be discovered in bunches, says Paul
Karol, a nuclear chemist who chaired IUPAC’s working group
on new elements. “Right now there’s a gap, but it hasn’t died
out.” Beyond 120, everything is contested. Some scientists
speak hopefully of coming upon an “island of stability,” a
group of elements holding such ideal numbers of protons
and neutrons that they’re magically stable, deigning to stick
around for hours or days or even years. “But it’s sure going
to be tough,” Karol says. “You’re trying to head in a certain
direction, and there’s a strong wind blowing you off-course.
It’s possible that you won’t make anything—that you drown
in the sea and not land on the island.”
And at that point, at long last, the campaign to expand the
periodic table will come to a halt. It won’t be for reasons of
material utility; the synthetic elements stopped being of any
practical use around No. 98. Rather, their value always lay in
the research they engendered: the design of experiments, the
careful consideration of beam speeds, and the study of the
physical properties of these fugitive atoms. “You’re training
people who can step aside from everyday science and come
up with something that’s new,” Karol says. But if elements
stop revealing themselves, research on the frontier dries up
as well. Grants will find new ventures, and scientists will fol-
low them; cyclotrons will be turned into more parking lots.
For the first time since 1869, when Dmitri Mendeleev stood
before the Russian Chemical Society and proposed a novel
way to arrange elements, his periodic table will cease to be
an unfinished work, a map with borders yet to be filled in. <BW>The Berkeley Lab in 1951COURTESY LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY