Researchers: Element 118 Created
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American and Russian researchers said yesterday that they had created element 118, the heaviest known element.
It is the fifth ultraheavy element produced by the team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, which has come to dominate the creation of rare, short-lived elements.
Although they produced only three atoms of element 118,and each lasted for less than one-thousandth of a second, the team said there was less than one chance in 10,000 that it was misidentified.
A team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., announced in 1999 that it had created element 118 by a different route, but those results were subsequently shown to have been fabricated by physicist Victor Ninov, who was later fired by Berkeley.
“We selected a completely different nuclear reaction, performed with completely different people in a different laboratory,” physicist Ken Moody of Livermore said yesterday.
