In a First, Element Will Be Named by Researchers in Japan
By Nicholas St. Fleur, NY Times, Jan. 4, 2016
Since the 19th century, European and American discoveries have monopolized the naming of elements on the periodic table. It is evident in entries like francium, germanium, scandium, polonium, europium, californium, berkelium and americium.
But now, for the first time, researchers in Asia will make an addition to chemistry’s most fundamental catalog.
Scientists from the Riken institute in Japan will bestow an official name on Element 113, currently known by the placeholder name ununtrium, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced last week.
The organization said that studies published by the Japanese scientists from 2004 to 2012 give the team the strongest claim to having discovered the element. The declaration comes more than 12 years after the Japanese team first attempted to synthesize the superheavy element, by firing beams of zinc at a thin bismuth film.
Led by Kosuke Morita, the group began to bombard bismuth atoms in a particle accelerator at 10 percent the speed of light in 2003. A year later, they successfully fused two atomic nuclei from these elements, creating their first nucleus of Element 113, but it decayed in less than a thousandth of a second. In 2005, the team produced Element 113 in a second event, but the chemistry union did not consider the demonstration strong enough to denote a discovery.
In 2012, the team finally produced strong evidence that they had synthesized Element 113. Over the course of those nine years, the beam was active for 553 days and launched more than 130 quintillion zinc atoms, according to Nature.
Dr. Morita has not yet announced what he intends to name Element 113, but according to a 2004 article in The Japan Times when the team first published its results, one likely contender may be “japonium.”
