Livermorium

The search for element 116 began in 1977, but it wasn’t until 2000 that scientists actually created the element, and not until 2011 that the element was officially recognized! Researchers from the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research (JINR) in Russia, the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Germany, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California were all working towards creating and confirming the new element. LLNL scientists successfully created the element and earned naming rights by bombarding calcium-48 and curium-248.

Studies on the element continue today. In the summer of 2024, researchers at Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory in California created livermorium by a different pathway—fusing titanium-50 and plutonium-244. Hiromitsu Haba, leader of the Superheavy Element Research group at Japan's RIKEN, Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science, said the new pathway was "truly groundbreaking" and will "greatly advance mankind towards the discovery of elements 119 and 120,"—elements that Haba's group is striving to discover.

Livermorium was first called ununhexium (Uuh), based on the Latin roots for its atomic number. The name Livermorium was chosen in 2012, to honor the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists for their dedicated work on superheavy metals.

Livermorium is a highly radioactive, superheavy element. We can only make predictions about its properties because it decays so quickly. It is a chalcogen, or ore-forming element, and is found in group 16 of the periodic table. It's in the same family as oxygen, sulfur, and selenium, but is predicted to be me more like polonium. This would make it a volatile metal or metalloid that is probably solid at room temperature.

Noone has been able to identify any uses for livermorium yet. It doesn’t hang around long enough to test it!

Four isotopes of livermorium are currently known to exist, with mass numbers of 290-293. But there may be a fifth one! The longest lasting isotope, livermorium-293, has a half-life of about 60 milliseconds, while livermorium-290 has a half-life of only 9 milliseconds.

Livermorium has only ever been created in a laboratory. It is not found in nature. It was made by blasting atoms of curium–248 with calcium–48 in a particle accelerator to create a nuclear fusion reaction. Only one atom of livermorium was made in this experiment, and it only existed for about 50 milliseconds–but they found it!