Super Heavy Alchemy Research Paper

Since ancient times people have attempted to transform other elements into gold, one of the most precious metals known at the time. Alchemy is the name of this practice, and, although the ancients did not succeed with it, they kept trying. Today’s scientists are still trying to transform one element into another, but not to create gold. They are attempting to do something much more interesting and successful, produce entirely new elements from those previously known. Modern scientists succeeded where the ancients failed, and created synthetic elements. To some the creation of new elements is like finding gold. It is a treasure hunt looking for new elements, because, even though scientists may be able to predict what elements they are going

Scientists theorize that there may be a group of super heavy elements with extremely long half-lives, on the order of days, or years as compared to the minutes and seconds of most synthetic elements (Witze, 2010). One of the challenges in reaching such an island of stability is the instability of the nuclei of super heavy atoms. When an atom’s nucleus has large numbers of protons forced into it they exhibit a repulsive force on each other, as all protons have a positive charge and like charges repel each other. This causes the nucleus to become unstable. Adding more neutrons to the nucleus of the atom can overcome this repulsive force(Witze, 2010). It may seem counterintuitive that as atoms become heavier they may exist a group of very stable ones, but, like electrons, protons and neutrons arrange themselves in “shells” (Witze, 2010). If an element has a full shell of protons and neutrons it will be more stable than one that has only a partially filled shell (Witze, 2010). A “doubly magic” nucleus is one where both of the subatomic particles fill all their shells; the nucleus is extremely stable (Halka & Nordstrom, 2011, p. 128). This is the reason there may be an island of stability at the end of the periodic table. Some theories predict that the island of stability may occur with 120, 124, 126, 168 or 184 protons in the nucleus (Halka & Nordstrom, 2011, p. 129). These numbers are very close to the highest number of protons that scientists have been able to form an atom with, 118 is the most protons that scientists have forced into an atom, so they may reach the island soon or it may never found, depending on the properties of the elements and technology available to