Periodic Table Gets Two New Elements

Animated Periodic Table set to Tom Lehrer’s The Elements

There are no names or even symbols for the two latest members to be admitted to the exclusive chemistry club — The Periodic Table of the Elements. Numbers 114 and 116 now have a place on that familiar chemical chart that everyone in high school sees but may not understand. Both are highly radioactive and exist for less than a second before decaying into more familiar elements.

After a three-year review a joint commission made up of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics determined that the two new elements, tentatively named ununquadium and ununhexium, met the strict criteria for inclusion in the periodic table.

Periodic Table, courtesy of www.ptable.com

During the last few years, there have been several claims by laboratories for the discovery of new chemical elements at positions 113, 114, 115, 116 and 118 on the periodic table. But until now, none met the standards for full inclusion.

In 1999, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory claimed to discover elements 116 and 118 while blasting lead with krypton particles. But that discovery was later retracted after several confirmation experiments failed to yield the same results.

Now, the periodic table has two more members of the transuranic element family. Those are elements heavier than uranium, which can generally only be produced artificially in either a nuclear reactor or a particle accelerator.

Current tables represent the theorized elements, including 114 and 116 already, but this is the first true addition in over ten years.

The new elements have temporary titles of ununquadium and ununhexium, but final names will be decided later. A movement afoot on online wants the public to choose the new names. It started on Wired.com and quickly migrated to Twitter.

Actually, the members of the U.S. and Russian team that confirmed the discovery will have the first shot at naming the new elements but it will have to go through a rigorous element naming approval process before the final names are selected.

Element 114 had several groups around the world claiming they had produced it in a lab. But a team from Dubna, Russia and a team from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California offered sufficient proof of its existence. The two groups who collaborated on this project were also credited with proving the existence of element 116.

They proved the existence of both elements by hurtling lighter atoms into heavier ones to see what would result. To discover 116 they smashed curium (atomic number 96) into calcium (atomic number 20). It rapidly decayed into element 114. They created element 114 by the collision of plutonium (atomic number 94) with calcium.

Why are teams of chemists and physicists doing this?

There is a theory about a so-called island of stability that exists where new heavy elements can exist for minutes, hours, days or weeks before decaying into lighter elements. Finding new out-of-the-box elements is the Holy Grail of chemistry and if it is found could open up the periodic table to a large range of new elements.