Nihonium

Nihonium was the first element to be discovered in Asia, created in 2004 at the RIKEN laboratory in Japan by a team led by Kosuke Morita, by fusing bismuth and zinc nuclei. Its name comes from Nihon, one of the Japanese names for Japan, meaning the Land of the Rising Sun. Nihonium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, known only from a very small number of atoms. Its isotopes last only seconds and it has no studied chemistry; expected to resemble a heavy, unstable relative of thallium, it was confirmed only after the RIKEN team spent years of patient accelerator runs to register a mere three atoms.

Morita's team spent about nine years attempting the specific fusion reaction that finally worked, registering only three confirmed decay chains across that entire span despite running the experiment for a combined total of hundreds of days, a testament to how vanishingly improbable each successful fusion event is at this end of the periodic table. A rival claim from the Dubna-Livermore collaboration, which had produced what appeared to be the same element as a decay product of element 115 experiments, was ultimately set aside in 2015 when IUPAC awarded priority, and so the right to name the element, to the Japanese team.

Nihonium marks a milestone: it was the first element discovered and named by researchers in Asia, breaking the long monopoly of the American, Russian and German laboratories on the making of new elements, and Japan took justifiable pride in the achievement. The name Nihon, or Nippon, means literally the origin of the sun, the Land of the Rising Sun, the poetic self-description of Japan that arose from its position to the east. There is a quiet fitness in a nation named for the sunrise adding a new element to the world's shared table for the first time. Nihonium has no ancient, mythological or alchemical tradition, being a synthetic element of the twenty-first century; its significance is geographic and historic, the entry of a new nation into the select company of element-makers.

The name Nihonium was formally confirmed by IUPAC in November 2016, and Japanese media and educators treated the moment as a significant milestone for national science, with the achievement prominently featured in school curricula and public science outreach as evidence that Japanese basic research could compete at the very frontier of physics alongside the traditional American, Russian and German powerhouses. RIKEN has since continued pursuing even heavier, still-undiscovered elements using the same painstaking fusion approach that finally yielded nihonium.