The race to discover new chemical elements will heat up in 2025, resulting in the heaviest one so far and a new row added to the periodic table if successful.
鈥淧atience will be the biggest challenge,鈥� says at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California.
Gates and her colleagues are one of a number of teams attempting to produce element 120, also currently known as unbinilium. Attempts to forge such synthetic substances, which don鈥檛 exist naturally on Earth, typically involve smashing a beam of charged atoms into a target made from a different, lighter element, in the hope that they fuse.
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The LBNL team is planning to use a beam of titanium particles (element 22) and a target made from the radioactive element californium (element 98), providing the correct number of protons to reach the 120 required for unbinilium.
This experiment will rely on a key breakthrough made by LBNL in 2024, which saw it deploy a titanium beam for the first time to create livermorium (element 116), in this case by firing it at a piece of plutonium (element 94).
鈥淭his was a big step toward the success of the element 120 project,鈥� says team member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. Ever since, the team has shifted focus to the californium target, which is currently being made at a different facility.
Gates and her colleagues are having to adjust everything in their setup because californium is significantly more radioactive than plutonium. These, and any future, experimental tweaks come at a cost 鈥� mathematical models suggest that it may take hundreds of days to produce just a single unbinilium atom and every time the experiment gets adjusted, that clock will reset, says Gates.
Because of this, the search may end up being slow and could carry over into 2026 or even 2027, though the team is hoping to get lucky.
Elsewhere, and are part of a team at RIKEN in Japan that is using a beam of vanadium (element 23) and targets made from curium (element 96) to try to create element 119, or ununennium, and which has also never been synthesised, making it a contender in the race for a new heaviest element. The pair declined to comment on the progress of their search.
Other teams hoping to claim the prize include one at the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and one at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Russia 鈥� the current record holder, having first synthesised oganesson (element 118) in 2002. This addition to the periodic table sits at its bottom right corner, meaning the discovery of elements 119 or 120 would require a new row.
Up until February 2022, JINR was collaborating with ORNL and Rykaczewski says that a californium target for that experiment was ready for a flight to Moscow, but the project ended abruptly when Russia invaded Ukraine. Preliminary results were promising, yet never published, says Rykaczewski. Whether the work at JINR can continue without ORNL is uncertain.
Whoever wins the race, everyone is keen to see what the ultra-heavy echelons of the periodic table have in store for us. 鈥淥bviously, we would like to discover element 120 first. But if somebody else discovers it, I think that鈥檚 still like a really great thing for the field, I would be happy for anyone,鈥� says Gates.
