PARIS, January 29. /TASS/. Russian scientists will hold the first experiments at the Super-Heavy Element Factory in Dubna near Moscow in April to synthesize the 114th and 115th elements of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, Scientific Director of the Flerov Laboratory at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research Yuri Oganesyan told TASS on Tuesday.
The world’s first Super-Heavy Element Factory (the DC-280 accelerator) was launched at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in December last year. The facility will help scientists synthesize and study new elements of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of Chemical Elements.
Today work has been actually launched at the world’s major nuclear physics centers to synthesize the 119th, 120th and 121st elements. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research expects the Super-Heavy Element Factory to help it be the first to obtain these chemical elements.
"Now the lab is ready and a new accelerator was launched in December. Its intensity is ten times higher than the intensity that was until now… If everything proceeds as we are planning, in April we will stage an experiment, which we already held before, for the synthesis of the 114th and 115th elements but only in this experiment there will be a hundred times more these heavy atoms. This is what all this (the new lab) was done for. This is the so-called demonstration experiment: to obtain what you have already done but in a new quantity. This will be the first step," Oganesyan said during events devoted to the opening of the Year of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table.
At the end of the year, the laboratory will be ready for synthesizing the 119th element, he said.
"What interest does the 119th element evoke? The 118th is the last element in its row and the 119th is the first in a new row. So, will there be a big difference between them, a big leap? This has to be found," the scientist said.
All the chemical elements heavier than the uranium are obtained in nuclear reactors or synthesized with the help of accelerators when the nuclei of other elements collide with each other. Element 119 tentatively called the ununennium will be the first in the 8th period of Mendeleev’s Table after it is synthesized.
The UN General Assembly has proclaimed the year 2019 as the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements, which is vivid demonstration of the periodic law discovered by Russian scientist Dmitry Mendeleev in 1869. This discovery will mark 150 years in 2019. The International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements is being officially opened on January 29 in Paris.