SOCHI, September 6 (Itar-Tass) —— The names of new chemical elements discovered by Russian scientists and numbered 114 and 116 will be made public in October 2011, Academic Supervisor of the Nuclear Reactions Laboratory of the Dubna United Nuclear Research Institute Yuri Oganesyan said at the fourth international conference on the Chemistry and Physics of the Transactinide Elements TAN 2011 in Sochi.
A hundred of leading physicists and chemists of the leading laboratories of France, Switzerland, Japan and Germany are attending the conference, which ends on September 11.
This is a series of conferences dedicated to the recent achievements, both in theory and experiment, in nuclear reactions and structure, chemistry and spectroscopy of the transactinide elements. The previous TAN conferences were held in Germany (Seeheim-Jugenheim, 1999), the USA (Napa, California, 2003) and Switzerland (Davos, 2007).
“It was believed only 40 years ago that such elements could not possibly exist, and the Mendeleev Periodic Table of Elements ended with the element number 100. My colleagues and I received a state award this year for discovering elements number 114 and 116, which would soon add to the Periodic Table,” Academician Oganesyan said. In his words, the Russian scientists were offered to name the new elements.
Elements with the atomic number larger than 104 are called transactinide elements because all of them are created artificially and are radioactive. Element 105, a super-heavy element, was called Dubnium in honor of the outstanding contribution of the Nuclear Research Institute to contemporary physics and chemistry. It is impossible for one country only to fulfill such an extensive project, so the institute cooperates with U.S. colleagues, he said.
“Russia holds a leading position, but we realize that modern science is so complex and expensive that it cannot be developed unilaterally. We offered U.S. colleagues to work in Dubna together. The academic community has a keen interest in such cooperation. We have been working together for 15 years, and new American laboratories are involving in this cooperation,” Oganesyan said.