Flerovium

Flerovium is named after the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at JINR in Dubna, Russia. It was first synthesised in 1999 by bombarding plutonium with calcium nuclei. Like copernicium, it may behave more like a noble gas than a metal.

• Atomic Number114114 protons, 114 electrons
• Atomic Mass290.192 uOver 114× heavier than hydrogen
• State at Room TempExpected to be a Solidpredicted solid
• DensityNot measuredPredicted from periodic trends
• Melting / BoilingNot yet measuredDecays in milliseconds to hours
• Discovered1998First produced 1994s

What is Flerovium?

Fl-289 has a half-life of approx. 2.7 seconds. Produced by the collaboration between Dubna (JINR) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA). Named after the Flerov Laboratory. Sits below lead in Group 14.

With 114 protons, Flerovium sits in Group 14 of the periodic table, Period 7, in the superheavy transactinide region. Its properties are predicted largely from theory and from single-atom chemistry experiments, not from bulk measurements.

Fact Flerovium (Fl, element 114) has only ever been produced a few atoms at a time. Each atom decays within milliseconds. No one has ever seen, touched or measured a weighable amount of flerovium. Everything we know about it comes from detecting individual radioactive decays and theoretical calculations.

Where you find Flerovium

On Earth

Flerovium does not exist naturally. It is made only artificially in nuclear physics laboratories by firing beams of one heavy nucleus at another and watching for the rare collisions that fuse them together. The main laboratories capable of producing superheavy elements are JINR in Dubna (Russia), GSI in Darmstadt (Germany), RIKEN in Japan and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

How we use Flerovium

Flerovium has no practical uses. Only a handful of atoms have ever been produced, each existing for a fraction of a second to a few minutes. Research focuses on understanding nuclear structure, testing theoretical models of the atom, and searching for the predicted "island of stability", a region of superheavy nuclei that may be significantly longer-lived than those currently known.

How it was discovered

Fl-289 has a half-life of approx. 2.7 seconds. Produced by the collaboration between Dubna (JINR) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA). Named after the Flerov Laboratory. Sits below lead in Group 14.

Deeper dive: superheavy elements and the island of stability

Nuclear physicists predict that certain combinations of protons and neutrons, "magic numbers", create particularly stable nuclei. For superheavy elements, a theoretical "island of stability" is predicted around element 114 (flerovium) or beyond, where nuclei with the right magic number of neutrons might have half-lives of years or even longer rather than milliseconds. So far, the search continues. Elements 113-118 were all officially confirmed and named in 2016, completing Period 7 of the periodic table. Whether an eighth period of elements beyond oganesson (118) can ever be made and studied remains one of the great open questions in chemistry and nuclear physics.

Superheavy elements are made by accelerating beams of lighter nuclei (often calcium-48, because of its convenient doubly-magic structure) to high energies and firing them at heavy targets (lead, bismuth, uranium, curium, californium). Very rarely, two nuclei fuse instead of bouncing apart. The fusion product is detected by its characteristic radioactive decay chain, a signature sequence of alpha decays each producing a known element, counted backwards to identify the original product.

Moving to 115 protons on the periodic table brings us to the next superheavy element.