Livermorium

Livermorium was first created in 2000 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, by fusing curium and calcium nuclei. It was named after the Livermore laboratory. Livermorium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, known only from a very small number of atoms. Its isotopes survive only milliseconds and it has no studied chemistry; expected to sit beneath polonium as a heavy relative of the chalcogens, it is known only through the sequence of alpha decays by which each atom betrays its brief existence.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, founded in 1952 as a second American nuclear-weapons design laboratory alongside Los Alamos, diversified over subsequent decades into a much wider range of physics research, including laser-driven fusion and, through this long-running partnership with Dubna, the creation of new superheavy elements, a notable second act for an institution originally built for entirely different Cold War purposes. The collaboration continued productively even through periods of considerable diplomatic tension between Washington and Moscow, an unusual constant in an otherwise strained relationship.

Livermorium honours the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the American partner in the long and productive collaboration with Dubna that produced several of the heaviest elements; the name credits the Livermore scientists whose work on target preparation and detection made the discoveries possible. It stands alongside flerovium and moscovium as one of the elements to emerge from that Russian-American partnership, an unusual case of Cold War rivals turned collaborators at the frontier of matter.

Livermorium has no ancient, mythological or alchemical tradition, being a synthetic element of the twenty-first century with no natural occurrence; its name records not a person or a nation but a specific laboratory, a reminder that the making of new elements has become the work of a few highly specialised institutions pooling their resources across the world. Livermorium's known isotopes decay within milliseconds, and theoretical calculations predict it would behave chemically as a heavier, more metallic relative of polonium, though, as with most of its superheavy neighbours, no experiment has yet gathered enough atoms to test that prediction directly against reality. Fewer than a hundred atoms of livermorium are thought to have ever been created since its first synthesis, each one registered only through the fleeting trail of its own radioactive decay.