Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is setting its sights on creating element 120 as part of a new US effort to discover the first elements in row eight of the periodic table. The move follows the breakdown of the US–Russian partnership, which had previously discovered the five heaviest elements, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Some scientists argue that finding new elements is not worth the money, especially when those atoms are inherently unstable and will disappear in a blink. “I personally don’t find it exciting, as a scientist, just to produce more short-lived elements,” says Witold Nazarewicz, a physicist who studies nuclear structure at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
But to element hunters, the payoff is compelling. The new elements would extend the table—now seven rows deep—to an eighth row, where some theories predict exotic traits will emerge. Elements in that row might even destroy the table’s very periodicity because chemical and physical properties might not repeat at regular intervals anymore. Pushing further into the eighth row also could answer questions that scientists have wrestled with since Dmitri Mendeleev’s day: How many elements exist? And how far does the table go?
Ghost Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/VC6Z8
Just to add, some also theorize that new elements may turn out to be stable, sort of the reverse of how f-block elements are a bunch of unstable elements in the middle of more stable [d-block] ones. If that is indeed the case, we may find a lot more candidates to work with in, say, materials science.
But also literally everything around us? Of my friends who went into materials sci/eng, two work in civil/commercial aerospace and one went to semiconductor.
