Understanding chemical and nuclear properties of superheavy elements. |
Discovering new elements and clarifying their unknown chemical and physical properties are most interesting and challenging subjects in both chemistry and physics. How many chemical elements can exist and can be produced? How long can they live? Which properties determine their stability? What are their chemical and physical properties? How well do their chemical properties follow the Periodic Table? And how are their orbital electron configurations affected by increasingly strong relativistic effects? These are some of the most fundamental questions in science.
Because of the short half-lives and the low production rate of SHEs, each atom produced decays before a new atom is synthesized. This means that any experiments to be performed must be done on an "atom-at-a-time" basis. Thus, rapid, very efficient and selective experimental procedures are indispensable to isolate the desired properties. We focus on the valence electronic structure of SHEs that is experimentally determined from their ionic radii, redox potentials, ionization potentials and compound formations. To elucidate the limits of stability of superheavy nuclei (SHN), the shell structure of SHN is investigated through proton and neutron single-particle structures and through the evolution of nuclear deformation at the highest proton and neutron numbers. |
