Oganesson, Where Art Thou?

Daniel Rabinovich

doi:10.1515/ci-2018-0414

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Oganesson, Where Art Thou?

Daniel Rabinovich

Published/Copyright: October 29, 2018

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From the journal Chemistry International Volume 40 Issue 4

Abstract

In a press release dated 30 December 2015, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) announced that a thorough review by independent experts of the experimental data available for the syntheses of elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 has been concluded, and that the discovery of the four elements completing the 7th row of the periodic table was confirmed. The elemental names and symbols proposed shortly thereafter by the corresponding discovery teams met the criteria prescribed by IUPAC for naming new elements, and nihonium (Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts), and oganesson (Og), became permanent within a few months. As such, the ending of the name of element 118 and its location in the periodic table, below radon in group 18, are consistent with the assumption that oganesson could be regarded as a noble gas.

However, the electronic structure of superheavy elements, and consequently their physical and chemical properties, is significantly affected by relativistic effects, even more so than the ones often invoked to explain the color of gold or the unexpectedly low melting point of mercury. In the case of oganesson, recent calculations suggest that the element might be a liquid (or perhaps a solid) near room temperature and that OgF4 would be tetrahedral (unlike XeF4, which is square planar). Experimental verification of these suggestions would be exceedingly difficulty since only a few atoms of oganesson-294 have ever been generated, and they have a half-life of only 0.89 ms!

The postage stamp illustrated in this note features Yuri T. Oganessian, a Russian nuclear physicist of Armenian descent and the scientific leader of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, where dozens of new superheavy isotopes have been made. Interestingly, oganesson is only the second chemical element to be named after a living person since the name of element 106 (seaborgium, Sg) was confirmed by IUPAC in 1997, when the legendary American chemist Glenn Seaborg (1912-1999) was still alive. The stamp also shows the californium-249 and calcium-48 isotopes involved in the production of oganesson-294, and the radioactive decay chain of Og-294 that leads to the transient generation of livermorium-290, flerovium-286, and copernicium-282.

Now that we are quickly approaching the International Year of the Periodic Table (2019), it is worth recognizing the effort of some of the scientists pursuing the synthesis of new elements or the preparation of more stable isotopes of existing elements that would be amenable to chemical characterization. It is probably just a matter of time (and a considerable amount of research) until elements 119 or 120 are added to the periodic table of the elements. Yuri, keep up the good work!

Written by Daniel Rabinovich <drabinov@uncc.edu>

Online erschienen: 2018-10-29

Erschienen im Druck: 2018-10-01

©2018 IUPAC & De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For more information, please visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ci-2018-0414