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110 |
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Press Release:Discovery of Element 110 at GSI
November 9, 1994 at 4:39 pm, the first atom of the heaviest chemical atom with atomic
number 110 was detected at the Gesellschaft fur Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt,
in Germany. For the last ten years, this element has been the subject of an intense search
by many laboratories world-wide.
Discovery
Element 110 was produced by fusing nickel and lead atom together. This was achieved by
accelerating the nickel atoms to a high energy in the heavy ion accelerator. "This
rare reaction occurs only at a very specific velocity of the nickel projectile. Over a
period of many days, many billion billion nickel atoms must be shot at a lead target in
order to produce and identify a single atom of element 110. The atoms produced in the
nickel-lead collisions are selected by a velocity filter and then captured in a detector
system which measures their decay. The energy of the emitted helium nuclei serves to
identify the atom" (Press Release). This element was only found to have a lifetime of
less than 1/1000th of a second. It is expected that soon a heavier version of element 110
that might be more stable, and that lives slightly longer will be developed.
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