MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th February, 2021) A team of researchers in the US was able to isolate and study the most elusive element on the periodic table that had evaded scientists for decades.
Einsteinium, named after the iconic physicist Albert Einstein, was discovered at the dawn of the nuclear era in the early 1950s, when short-lived remnants were left after experimental detonations of hydrogen bombs in the US deserts.
Scientists at the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory published a study in the journal Nature describing how they produced 250 nanograms of pure eisnteinium and studied its basic properties.
With an atomic number of 99, einsteinium is the heaviest element and belongs to the actinide group - the 15 metallic elements at the bottom of the periodic table.
Einsteinium is extremely radioactive and has a short half-life, which means it quickly breaks apart into other elements.
Lead scientist Rebecca Abergel told the Berkley Lab's publication that the breakthrough can help expand human understanding of the actinide group elements, which do not occur in nature.
"There's not much known about einsteinium," said Abergel, who leads Berkeley Lab's Heavy Element Chemistry group and is an assistant professor in UC Berkeley's Nuclear Engineering department. "It's a remarkable achievement that we were able to work with this small amount of material and do inorganic chemistry. It's significant because the more we understand about its chemical behavior, the more we can apply this understanding for the development of new materials or new technologies, not necessarily just with einsteinium, but with the rest of the actinides too. And we can establish trends in the periodic table."
The researchers were able to measure einsteinium's bond distance to determine the quality of its reactivity with other elements.
The element was produced inside the specialized nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee by bombarding the element curium, the atomic number of which is 96, with neutrons and protons to form the heavier element.
The team developed special techniques to study and measure the element because the samples obtained were too contaminated with other related elements, primarily californium. The team saw that the element reacts to light and other manipulations in a unique way.
