SCIENCE JOURNAL 2018

Figure 2:

Graph that distributes half-lives along-side the size of an element.

Figure 2 shown above proves this. As seen in the graph, Nihonium’s atomic number is 113, and has the longest half-life out of all the superheavy elements at 19.6 seconds and Oganesson 118, has the smallest half-life of 0.89 milliseconds. The difference between these elements is 19599.11 milliseconds. This proves that as the size of the atom increases from 113 to 118, the stability of the element is decreased due to the electrostatic force that keeps particles together, being weakened by the over-manageable amount of particles that are required to be kept together. Creating superheavy elements In order to produce the superheavy elements, specialist scientists use a particle accelerator called the cyclotron. This high-tech piece of apparatus is used to accelerate nuclei to very high energies (around 10% of the speed of light) and firing it at the other nucleus. Most of the time, the atom breaks apart immediately, but in extremely rare conditions, they stick together, creating the superheavy element. The event of the nucleus sticking is greatly infrequent and gets increasingly rare as the elements become larger, due to their stability. Even if the new element is created, they are often so unstable that it breaks apart imminently. The elements may not be active for long, but researchers can look to study the decay chain of the particle for information on that particular element.

Figure 3: The Relationship between Nuclear Stability and the Neutron- to-Proton Ratio (Chem.libretexts.org, 2016). The island or band of stability is a theorized cluster of super heavy elements that don’t decay despite theorised unstable weight. It is predicted that there is a “magic number” of protons and neutrons in an atom that would assist the super heavy elements to extend their half-lives, in order for scientists to research with more evidence and possibly use the elements to experiment; putting them towards a cause. The figure below shows the Relationship between Nuclear Stability and the Neutron- to-Proton Ratio (Chem.libretexts.org, 2016). Below, figure 3 shows that as the number of protons in the atom increases, the number of neutrons increases even quicker in order to keep the nucleus stablised. The purple dots in the top right corner symbolise the super heavy elements that are predicted to be radioactive but last longer that other unstable nuclei due to the “magic number’ of protons and neutrons in the atom. Unfortunately, these elements have not yet been discovered.

SC J SI

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Somerset College Journal of Scientific Issues

Year 10