Actinide Chemistry at the 88-Inch Cyclotron with Jennifer Pore

Actinide Chemistry at the 88-Inch Cyclotron

Transcript

Jennifer Pore: The biggest picture issue is that perhaps the periodic table is wrong. So in our group, we do heavy element studies, and at the very bottom of the periodic table where these heavy elements live, it's very possible that their placements don't actually give the correct chemistry. So they're not in the right places at the bottom of the table.

However, it's very difficult to study these elements and actually figure out whether or not that's true and what their true chemistry actually is, and then where perhaps they should be placed more appropriately on the periodic table. There's several issues why the experiments are so hard.

So, for anything greater than Z equals a hundred, you need to produce those atoms yourself in nuclear reactions. And then they're very short-lived, and you need to somehow study their chemistry before they decay away. So, for the last forever, there's been no direct molecule identification for elements greater than a hundred.

And when you're trying to study the chemistry of things, that's a significant challenge to actually know what molecule you've made, 'cause that's directly related to the chemical properties. So in our group we've developed a new technique that lets you make the molecule and directly identify it. So we can actually see what chemistry is going on.

And what is really exciting about this result here is we did a comparative study of actinium and nobelium, which are the two bookends of the actinide series. And typically, when people are doing actinide chemistry, they'll look at just a single element at a time. But we were able to do this nice comparative study of these two very difficult elements that are very challenging to look at, and we could do both of them simultaneously. And we were able to do direct molecule identification for their chemistry. 

This really opens the door to the next generation of atom-at-a-time chemistry studies. So looking at the chemistry of superheavy elements and asking whether or not they are in the correct positions on the periodic table.