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Physicists may now have a way to make element 120
A method that helped create two atoms of the rare, super-heavy element livermorium may pave the way towards making the hypothetical element 120
“We were very shocked, very surprised, very relieved that we didn’t make any bad choices in setting up the instrumentation,” says Jacklyn Gates at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California. When the beam reached roughly 10 per cent of the speed of light and collided with the plutonium target, the resulting debris hit a detector that revealed signatures of exactly two atoms of livermorium. In the intervening years, researchers have struggled to make atoms any heavier because that requires smashing together already very heavy elements, which tend to be unstable themselves.
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