Vanderbilt professor helps discover new element 'Tennessine'
OAK RIDGE — A team of scientists from Tennessee has helped discover a new element that might bring the Volunteer State to the 117th slot on the periodic table.
The Tennessee coalition, which included researchers from Vanderbilt University, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, played a key role in the 2010 discovery and confirmation of a series of super-heavy elements. Vanderbilt professor Joseph Hamilton suggested one of those, element 117, be named Tennessine, according to a statement from the university.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced the "provisional recommendation" to accept Hamilton's suggestion. Its symbol will be Ts. Upon approval, Tennessee will become the second state to have an element named after it, according to Vanderbilt. Californium, element 98, was discovered in the 1950s, the university said.
The international body also announced the proposed names and symbols for elements 113, 115 and 118. The names will undergo a public review before final approval.
“Formal certification of these provisional names is expected in five months,” Hamilton, the Vanderbilt professor, said in a statement. “After this occurs, the name of the state of Tennessee will be in the periodic table in textbooks of physics and chemistry worldwide forever.”
The discovery team for three of the elements included 72 scientists from 16 institutions around the world.
The development of unique super-heavy elements was aided by production of source materials — such as berkelium-249 — at ORNL's High Flux Isotope Reactor. The target material was synthesized at the lab's Radiochemical Engineering Development Center and then shipped to a research facility in Dubna, Russia, where the actual experiment that produced element 117 took place a few years ago.
Jim Roberto, ORNL's director of science and technology partnerships, said each of the institutions involved with the discovery team participated in a conference call earlier to discuss the possible names for the new elements.
"It was a very collegial process," he said.
The ORNL official said the lab was involved in experiments for three of four new elements, but was particularly tied to the development of element 117. Over an 18-month period, ORNL produced and purified the target material, berkelium, that was used in an accelerator experiment at Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research to produce the new element.
"We could not have done this experiment in the U.S.," Roberto said. "The Russians could not have done this without us. It was a wonderful collaboration."
Not only did the Oak Ridge lab produce the target material for experiments, but ORNL scientists also traveled to Russia to work with the international team on detector technologies and other aspects of the work.
ORNL was also involved in experiments for two other new elements — 115 (to be called Moscovian in recognition of Moscow) and 118 (to be called Oganesson, recognizing Professor Yuri Oganessian as the scientific leader).
The fourth new element to be given a provisional name on Wednesday was element 113, which was discovered by a team in Japan. It will be called nihonium (nihon translates in Japanese to "Land of the Rising Sun").
In a phone interview, Roberto said the establishment of new super-heavy elements such as Tennessine is important to scientists because it provides the strongest evidence yet of a concept known as the "island of stability."
According to ORNL, that concept was originally proposed in the 1960s and "predicts increased stability for superheavy nuclei at higher neutron and proton numbers." The nuclei produced in the experiments are consistent with the island of stability, the lab said.
"It puts us on the shores of the island," Roberto said, noting the future prospects are promising. "We may be able to make materials that have never been produced before, with new properties. This is a journey, and this is probably the most important step on that journey (to date)."