The Next Element: How Chemists are Expanding the Periodic Table

Nihonium. Moscovium. Tennessine. Oganesson. With these discoveries, IUPAC recognized the last row of the Periodic Table as complete in 2016. In recent years, experiments to measure the properties of these new superheavy elements and discover more have pushed the limits of available technology without producing definitive data. What makes these experiments so difficult?

Join Associate Professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University Charles “Cody” M. Folden III and Jenifer Shafer of the Colorado School of Mines during this interactive recording as they discuss the challenges that are poised at the bottom of the Periodic Table. Discover how to determine the chemical properties of an element when only a handful of atoms are available as well as why discovering new superheavy elements will likely be very difficult and may require new technology like a next-generation particle accelerator.

What You Will Learn:
• The status of element discovery science
• The theoretical description of the nuclear reactions that produce superheavy elements
• How the chemical properties of superheavy elements are determined

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