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Chemistry of Darmstadtium

  • Page ID
    25576
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    As early as 1991, scientists at Berkeley reported evidence of element 110, but definitive work seems to have emerged in November of 1994 from the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany. To produce a single atom of 110, the researchers used the UNILAC accelerator to bombard a target of lead over many days with more than a billion nickel atoms. Detectors searched each collision for element 110's distinctive (predicted) decay sequence.

    On August 16, 2003, at the 42nd General Assembly in Ottawa, Canada, the IUPAC Council officially approved the name for element of atomic number 110, to be known as darmstadtium, with symbol Ds. In 2001, a joint IUPAC-IUPAP Working Party (JWP) confirmed the discovery of element of atomic number 110 and this by the collaboration of Hofmann et al. from the Gesellschaft fr Schwerionenforschung mbH (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany (Pure Appl. Chem. 73, 959-967 (2001)). The most relevant experiment resulted from the fusion-evaporation using a 62Ni beam on an isotopically enriched 208Pb target, which produced four chains of alpha-emitting nuclides following the presumed formation of 269Uun(element 110) + n. (S. Hofmann et al., Z. Phys. A350, 277-280 (1995)).

    With the name and symbol, we now can write the reaction equation of bombardment of lead with nickel ions as:

    \[\ce{^{208}Pb} + \ce{^{62}Ni} \rightarrow \ce{^{269}_{110}Ds} + \ce{n} \nonumber \]

    In accordance with IUPAC procedures, the discoverers at the GSI were invited to propose a name and symbol for element 110. They proposed the name darmstadtium, with the symbol Ds. Thus continues the long-established tradition of naming an element after the place of its discovery.

    Contributors and Attributions

    • Stephen R. Marsden

    • Chung (Peter) Chieh (Chemistry, University of Waterloo)

    Chemistry of Darmstadtium is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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