Flerovium and livermorium may join periodic table

Jeff Hecht, contributor

It's time to pencil flerovium (Fl) and livermorium (Lv) at the bottom of the periodic table. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced the proposed names today for elements 114 and 116, which were discovered more than 10 years ago, but only formally accepted as valid in June. Final approval will come only after a five-month comment period.

The names recognise the two groups which collaborated on the discovery, from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. The team crashed ions of calcium, element 20, into a target of curium, element 96, to form element 116, which quickly decayed into element 114. They also produced element 114 directly by firing calcium ions at plutonium.

Flerovium is named after the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, part of the Joint Institute in Dubna, where the short-lived atoms were made. That lab was named for Russian physicist Georgiy Flerov, a pioneer in heavy-ion research, who established the US-Russia research partnership in 1989 together with Ken Hulet of Livermore. Flerov died in 1990; Hulet died last year.

Livermorium was named for the Livermore lab, established by Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller in 1952. Element 103, Lawrencium, was named in 1965 for Lawrence, who received the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the cyclotron and died in 1958 at the age of 57. Element 52, tellurium, has nothing to do with Teller; it was named in 1798 after the Latin word "tellus" for earth, more than a century before the controversial father of the US hydrogen bomb was born in 1908.

Too few atoms of the new elements have been produced to study their chemistry, but flerovium is just below lead in the periodic table, and livermorium is just below polonium and tellurium. Elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 also have been reported, but remain unnamed.

Researchers hope that flerovium and livermorium are stepping stones to an "island of stability" where heavier elements would have isotopes with long enough lifetimes to be studied more extensively or used practically.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1a95244e/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A110C120Cflerovium0Eand0Elivermorium0Emay0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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