Not naturally occurring on Earth, the so-called 'synthetic element' was discovered among the debris of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952. Since then, very few experiments have been undertaken with ...

The scientists made the 233-nanogram sample by bombarding a different element, curium, with subatomic particles to crowd its nucleus and form the separate elements californium and einsteinium.

Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) at the University of California, recently created a 233-nanogram sample of pure einsteinium and carried out the first ...

After making the einsteinium, the team quickly realized that the sample wasn’t pure. In fact, a significant quantity of californium had also been made during the process, contaminating the ...

The first problem they encountered was that the sample was contaminated with a significant amount of californium, as making pure einsteinium in a usable quantity is extraordinarily challenging.

But einsteinium's instability limited scientists ability to study the element. Before researchers at Berkeley could test the element's properties, they had to acquire a stable sample. The ...

But einsteinium-254’s half-life meant that roughly 7 percent of the sample was lost each month that ticked by during the lockdown. “By the time we got back into the lab, there wasn’t enough ...

Number 99 on the periodic table does not occur naturally and is difficult to make and store, challenging researchers who want to study it. By Kenneth Chang Einsteinium is an element with a famous ...

The team managed to measure the bond distance of einsteinium-254 using X-ray absorption spectroscopy, in which you bombard the sample with X-rays (this line of inquiry also required building a ...

The researchers worked with a slightly more stable version of einsteinium that takes 276 days to lose half its material. Every month, the sample lost about seven percent of its mass. To protect ...

The first problem they encountered was that the sample was contaminated with a significant amount of californium, as making pure einsteinium in a usable quantity is extraordinarily challenging. So ...

In their study, Professor Abergel and colleagues produced their einsteinium sample in the so-called High Flux Isotope Reactor in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, one of the few ...