Rutherfordium

Rutherfordium belongs to a class of elements that have only been created in laboratories. You'd think credit for the creation of a synthetic element would be pretty straight forward, but the question of when and who first discovered rutherfordium remains controversial.

In 1964, a team led by Georgi Flerov (sometimes spelled Georgii Flyorov) was the first group to report discovering element 104. The team, based in then-Soviet Union at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), bombarded atoms of plutonium-242 with atoms of neon-22, with the goal of causing the atoms to fuse and—presto!—create a new element. The team wanted to name the element kurchatovium, after Soviet physicist Igor Kurchatov—father of the Soviet atomic bomb. But the scientific community had doubts about the team’s research, and the element remained officially undiscovered.

In 1969, an American team led by Albert Ghiorso at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory published their efforts to synthesize element 104. The Berkeley team couldn't replicate the pathway that Flerov's team claimed, but they did discover three pathways to produce the new element—bombarding curium-248 with oxygen-18 and californium-248 and -249 with carbon-12 and -13, respectively. They proposed calling the new element rutherfordium, after New Zealander physicist Ernest Rutherford—father of nuclear physics.

Over twenty years later, in 1992, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) ruled that both teams deserved credit for discovering the element. However, IUPAC decided that the element should get the American name, rutherfordium.

Rutherfordium atoms have extremely short half-lives, and only a relatively small number of atoms of the element have ever been produced. For these reasons, scientists can only predict many of the element’s qualities. Rutherfordium is the first transactinide element (all of which have atomic numbers greater than 103). It’s thought that rutherfordium is a silvery metal like other group 4 elements, such as titanium, zirconium, and hafnium.

Rutherfordium has no known non-research uses.

It’s thought that rutherfordium should make a very stable oxide. Rutherfordium also forms volatile chlorides.

There are 16 known isotopes of rutherfordium, all of which are synthetic. The longest-lived rutherfordium isotope, rutherfordium-267, has a half-life of around 48 minutes, while the shortest-lived isotopes have half-lives of less than 50 microseconds. (A microsecond is one millionth of a second!)

You won’t find rutherfordium in nature, it exists only in laboratories with highly specialized equipment that allows researchers to bombard atoms—a kind of molecular bowling alley!