Lawrence Berkeley could be the first to create a brand new Periodic Table element

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say they have developed the technology that could finally produce the fabled element 120, which would require the addition of a new row to the periodic table.

Most elements on the periodic table are naturally occurring - scientists only needed to find them to study their properties. However, many heavy elements are unstable under normal conditions. So, the only way to produce and study them is in the lab. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (AKA Berkeley Lab) has something of a pedigree when discovering elements. Of the 118 known elements, this facility is responsible for discovering 16 of them.

Creating a new element is complex, but it's easy to distil. Scientists just have to bombard a heavy element with other heavy elements until things stick together. Berkeley Lab has used an 88-inch cyclotron - a type of particle accelerator - to blast plutonium atoms with a beam of titanium atoms. After 22 days of bombardment, the team succeeded in turning plutonium into two atoms of element 116, known as livermorium. This is the first time it has been created using a titanium beam.

Like most super-heavy elements, livermorium degrades into lighter elements almost immediately. However, the team believes this process can be applied to element 120, preliminarily dubbed unbinilium. It won't be quite as easy, though.

"We think it will take about 10 times longer to make 120 than 116. It’s not easy, but it seems feasible now," said Reiner Kruecken, director of Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division.

To create new elements, researchers must choose the target and beam atoms carefully. The team couldn't use the normal calcium-48 beam. The heaviest viable target atom is californium-249, which has 98 protons. Calcium-48 has 20 protons, which doesn't get you to 120 - it would create an element called oganesson. They needed something with 22 protons, hence the work with titanium-50. It can take trillions of interactions before the targets fuse, but this research shows that the cyclotron can make a sufficiently intense beam of titanium atoms to create heavier elements.

This research is available on the arXiv preprint server, and it has been submitted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. The team is now working to adapt the technique to find a new element, with work beginning as soon as next year. It could take several years before any samples of element 120 appear.

If created at Berkeley Lab, element 120 would be the first square on the periodic table's 8th row. Scientists are particularly interested in creating element 120 because it exists in a theorized "Island of Stability." While other superheavy elements have half-lives measured in milliseconds, the predicted combination of protons and neutrons could make element 120 much more long-lived. For the first time, scientists could study heavy-element chemistry at their leisure rather than hoping to catching a glimpse before it goes “Poof!”