Mr Element 118: The only living person on the periodic table
Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian has had new element 118 named after him, and he says the superheavy stuff could send shock waves through the atomic world.
You’re the only person alive to have an element named after them. How does it feel to join the likes of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie?
For me, it is an honour. The discovery of element 118 was by scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, and it was my colleagues who proposed the name oganesson. My children and grandchildren have been living in the US for decades, but my daughter wrote to me to say that she did not sleep the night she heard because she was crying. My grandchildren, like all young people, reacted quite calmly.
How many elements have you helped discover since you started working on them in 1956?
We’ve come a long way. When I started, we had only 101 elements. Today, it’s 118, completing the seventh row of the periodic table. Since I joined the Flerov laboratory, I’ve mostly been making elements, which is why I helped discover many of them. Our collaboration with US researchers has also been strong, even during the cold war.
How do you make superheavy new elements?
With great difficulty. For an atom to exist, it needs a nucleus that balances attractive and repulsive forces, so we need a “magic number” of protons and neutrons. We create new elements by accelerating atoms to a tenth of the speed of light and smashing them into heavier, target elements. When we get a collision, there’s a small chance they’ll fuse to make a superheavy nucleus.
