James' World 2

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At the far end of the periodic table is a realm where nothing is quite as it should be. The elements here, starting at atomic number 104 (rutherfordium), have never been found in nature. In fact, they’d emphatically prefer not to exist. Their nuclei, bursting with protons and neutrons, tear themselves apart via fission or radioactive decay within instants of their creation.

These are the superheavy elements: after rutherfordium come dubnium, seaborgium, bohrium, and other oddities, all the way up to the heaviest element ever created, oganesson, element 118. Humans have only ever made vanishingly small amounts of these elements. As of 2020, 18 years after the first successful creation of oganesson in a laboratory, scientists had reported making a total of five atoms of it. Even if they could make much more, it would never be the kind of stuff you could hold in your hand—oganesson is so radioactive that it would be less matter, more heat.

Using ultrafast, atom-at-a-time methods, researchers are starting to explore this unmapped region of the periodic table and finding it as fantastical as any medieval cartographer’s imaginings. Here at the uncharted coastline of chemistry, atoms have a host of weird properties, from pumpkin-shaped nuclei to electrons bound so tightly to the nucleus they’re subject to the rules of relativity, not unlike objects orbiting a black hole.

Their properties may reveal more about the primordial elements created in massive astrophysical phenomena such as supernovae and neutron star mergers. But more than that, studying this strange matter may help scientists understand the more typical matter that occurs naturally all around us. As researchers get better at pinning these atoms down and measuring them, they’re pushing the boundaries of the way we organize matter in the first place.

“The periodic table is something fundamental,” says Witold Nazarewicz, a theoretical nuclear physicist and chief scientist at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University. “What are the limits of this concept? What are the limits of atomic physics? Where is the end of chemistry?”

Affixed to the wall in a concrete-block corridor known as Cave 1 in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), just steps from one of the few instruments in the world that can create superheavy atoms, is a poster-size printout of a table that organizes elements by nuclide, meaning based on the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. This graph shows all the known information about the nuclear structure and decay of the elements, as well as of their isotopes—variations on elements with the same number of protons in the nucleus but different numbers of neutrons.

It’s a living document. There’s a typo in the title, and there are tears along the poster’s edges where duct tape holds it to the wall. It’s been marked up with notations in Sharpie, added after the poster was printed in 2006. These notations are the atomic physics version of seafarers penciling in new islands as they sail, but in this case, the islands are isotopes of elements so heavy they can be seen only in particle accelerators like the one here. In a field where it can take a week to make just one atom of what you want, a record of progress is essential.

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