Flerovium

Flerovium was first created in 1998 and 1999 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, by fusing plutonium and calcium nuclei. It was named after Georgy Flerov, the Soviet physicist who founded the Dubna laboratory. Flerovium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, of special interest because it lies near the theorised island of stability. Some flerovium isotopes survive for seconds, unusually long for so heavy an element, which is much of why it draws such interest, and early experiments on single atoms have tried to determine whether it behaves as a volatile metal or, more strangely, like a noble gas.

The island-of-stability prediction dates to nuclear shell-model calculations of the 1960s, which suggested that, just as certain magic numbers of protons and neutrons make ordinary nuclei like lead unusually stable, a similar magic combination near 114 protons and 184 neutrons might grant some superheavy nuclei surprising longevity; flerovium's heaviest confirmed isotopes fall short of that exact neutron count but already show half-lives measured in seconds, tantalisingly longer than most of their neighbours and consistent with the island's edge being close by.

Flerovium honours Georgy Flerov, a founder of Soviet nuclear physics who established the Dubna laboratory that has produced so many of the superheavy elements, and who is also remembered for noticing, during the Second World War, the sudden silence of Western physics on nuclear fission and inferring that a secret bomb project must be underway. Element 114 carries a particular theoretical interest, for it sits close to the long-predicted island of stability, a region of the chart where certain superheavy nuclei with special numbers of protons and neutrons are expected to survive far longer than their neighbours, perhaps for minutes or more rather than fractions of a second.

Flerovium has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a synthetic element; its fascination lies in that predicted island, a possible shore of relative permanence at the far edge of matter. Reaching the true predicted centre of the island remains beyond current technology, since the fusion reactions available today cannot supply enough extra neutrons to the resulting nucleus, a limitation that drives ongoing research into new accelerator techniques, including proposed multi-nucleon transfer reactions, that might finally close the gap.