Superheavy

by Kit Chapman

  Dubna and Livermore are joined at the hip. The mayors have visited each other, proclamations have been made. And the elements have started to take on a very modern form of celebration. Marchand writes with a ‘livermorium’ pen; has a ‘livermorium’ tie; sports ‘livermorium’ pins. When the US team last went over to Dubna, they brought a present of wine glasses from the Livermore Valley. ‘We rolled up to the Flerov Institute,’ Marchand recalls, ‘and we saw dials saying the temperature, and then gauges for background radiation. You go “OK, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Then I’m sitting with Yuri Oganessian, and we’re doing vodka shots out of Livermore wine glasses.’ The Russians and Americans decided to christen the new elements with their own alcoholic beverages: JINR made own-brand vodka; Livermore made sure there was more than enough ‘livermorium’ wine to pass around. The local golf club even has its own tournament, the Livermorium Cup. After all, isn’t it much more valuable per atom than gold, silver or bronze?

  It’s only with stories like this that you realise just how important the meeting between Hulet and Flerov was. Flerovium and livermorium aren’t just important for chemistry; they have stitched communities on opposite sides of the world together.

  Element 113 would do even more. It was about to unite an entire country.

  Notes

  1 ‘We recognised that the younger scientists on the [Ninov] paper probably would not have had much voice to object or change things,’ recalls Mark Stoyer. ‘The third or fourth author [on a paper] isn’t mentioned much with regards to discovery of an element, so those authors shouldn’t get huge amounts of blame either.’

  2 Element 115 has a strange claim to fame. In 1989 a UFO theorist called Bob Lazar told a Las Vegas TV show that he worked in the mysterious Area 51, where he says he reverse-engineered alien spacecraft for the US government. These UFOs, Lazar insisted, were powered by the then-undiscovered element 115. But this is a popular science book, not a conspiracy ‘zine …

  3 While ‘flerovium’ had been suggested previously, nobody had actually used it, so the name was unlikely to cause any confusion.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Beams of the Rising Sun

  In November 1945 the US forces occupying Japan started dumping large metal objects into the waters of Tokyo Bay. Gathered on the deck of their ship, the sailors watched as these strange, alien creations were slowly edged off the side. One by one, the objects’ lines were loosened and they began to topple overboard, hitting the water with a satisfying sploosh as they descended to their watery grave.

  Back on dry land, Yoshio Nishina was distraught. The hunks of metal thrown into the sea were the remains of his cyclotrons. A month earlier, he had been granted permission to continue using them for medical, chemical and metallurgical research. But Robert Patterson, the US secretary of war, had changed his mind. Over a period of five days, working day and night, Nishina’s machines had been ripped apart by engineers from the Eighth United States Army. A short time later, the engineers would also destroy cyclotrons in Osaka and Kyoto, even smashing a beta-spectrometer for good measure after misinterpreting a joke from one of the aghast scientists. It was pure vandalism: the destruction of every particle accelerator in Japan.

  Nishina was one of the leading nuclear physicists in the world. In 1918 he had graduated from Tokyo Imperial University as an electrical engineer and had joined the Japanese Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN). In 1921 he had been sent as a student to tour the research institutes of Europe, where he had become good friends with Niels Bohr. On his return to Japan, he had established his own laboratory and set out to probe the mysteries of the atom.

  RIKEN was a unique set-up: a network that could be described as both independent research laboratories and a zaibatsu or business conglomerate. Founded in 1917 by scientists worried that Japan was losing step with the major powers, RIKEN’s mission was, according to its architect Eiichi Shibusawa, to ‘turn the country from imitation to creative power […] to promote research in pure physics and chemistry’. Initially, the Japanese government had refused to back it, so instead it had been set up thanks to private donations, including some from the imperial family. For Nishina, RIKEN provided the perfect base for his research into quantum mechanics – and a backer with enough resources to help him discover a new element.

  Japanese science had been trying to make its name in the world of element discovery since the start of the twentieth century. It had come close several times. In 1908 Masataka Ogawa, working under William Ramsay at University College London, had been testing a sample of thorianite when his chemical analysis came across something unknown. Ramsay, who had discovered the noble gases a few years earlier, encouraged the young chemist to publish his findings. Ogawa claimed he had discovered element 43, and called it ‘nipponium’ after his homeland. On his return to Japan, Ogawa had tried to follow up on his experiments – good science requires repetition, after all – but had been thwarted by a lack of modern equipment. Eventually, the claim was dismissed. Some modern researchers suspect Ogawa had discovered element 75 (today called rhenium) and misidentified it. If so, it was an easy mistake to make: both elements were in the same group in the periodic table and have similar chemical characteristics.

  Nishina had also come close to discovering an element. Following Ernest Lawrence’s blueprint, in 1937 he had built his own cyclotron, the first such machine made outside the US, which he had used to bombard thorium with fast neutrons, discovering the isotope uranium-237. This was a beta emitter and decayed into the then-undiscovered element 93. Nishina almost certainly created neptunium before Edwin McMillan and Phil Abelson confirmed their discovery – yet, like Ogawa before him, he hadn’t been able to prove his new element.1

  In April 1941, while Nishina was still trying to prove his discovery, he found his resources diverted. By then it had become clear that, for Japan to further its ambitions in the Pacific, war with the US was inevitable. RIKEN became occupied by project Ni-Go – one of the Japanese attempts to make a nuclear weapon. Nishina (the ‘Ni’ in the code name) was put in charge of the project and assigned himself the hardest task: enriching uranium.

  Nishina had doubts that his homeland, with its lack of natural resources, could ever build an atomic bomb.2 However, Ni-Go meant even more funding for his cyclotrons, so he played along. By 1944 RIKEN had created a 220t cyclotron that was a twin of its counterpart at Berkeley. Ostensibly it was to help make the weapon; in reality it was a research tool. Wisely, Nishina decided to keep the truth to himself.

  Project Ni-Go collapsed soon after. In April 1945 RIKEN’s main laboratories were bombed, destroying its thermal diffusion equipment. A month later, a German U-boat loaded with of 560kg (1,235lb) of uranium destined for Japan – a last, desperate throw of the dice by the Axis powers – was captured in the Atlantic. In June, Nishina told his superiors that the bomb project was over: a nuclear weapon was simply unfeasible.

  The morning of 6 August 1945 changed his mind. A single bomb fell on the city of Hiroshima, levelling 12.2km2 (4.7 miles2) of the city and destroying almost 70 per cent of its buildings. Around 80,000 people died in the initial blast and immediate firestorm. A further 70,000 were injured, many with their clothes seared into their skin. Nishina was summoned to a secret government meeting where, despite the strict wartime censorship, he was shown a release from US President Truman. There, in front of worried officials, Nishina had confirmed Truman’s claim that the one bomb ‘had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT’.

  It marked the end of the Empire of Japan. Heading to Hiroshima to survey the damage first-hand, Nishina left a note for one of his staff. ‘If Truman is telling the truth, it is now the time for those involved in the Ni-Project to commit hara-kiri [ritual suicide].’ Evidently, he reconsidered.

  After the war, Nishina tried to preserve his cyclotrons, hoping they could help his country rebuild. As his creations fell into the sea, he knew he had nothing to offer. ‘By the sad and untimely destruction,’ he later
wrote in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, ‘[the cyclotrons were] robbed of any chance to make contributions to science.’ In Oak Ridge, the US scientists agreed, slamming the desecration of the machines as ‘wanton and stupid to the point of constituting a crime against mankind’. Japanese science was dead in the water.

  It was the least of the country’s woes. For the first time in its history, Japan was an occupied country, its people starving, its culture and heritage reshaped and reforged by a victorious US. Rather than give up on his life’s work, Nishina wrote to the Americans, asking for help to teach nuclear physics again. The response was blunt: ‘All of Japan is hungry. If I were Japanese, I would take a shovel [and plant crops].’

  Nishina ignored the advice and resumed his research. By the time of his death in 1951, Japan was on the road to recovering its lost scientific prestige. Yet it was still missing an element to call its own. RIKEN was on a mission to honour the legacies of Ogawa and Nishina. The emperor of Japan had helped establish the institute – and RIKEN wanted to repay the debt with a new element.

  * * *

  Tokyo is basking in a heatwave. The temperature is past 40 °C, but the hive never abates, never ceases and never stops. Commuters, packed like sardines, desperately fan themselves to stay cool; kids in school uniforms swoon even as they remain glued to their phone screens; waitresses dressed as French maids, dolphins or game characters try to lure passing customers into their cafes. Above and around, everywhere, blares electric activity. Anime creations wave at you from LED billboards, calling for your attention as a kaleidoscopic shower of stars cascades behind them. Trains course through the city’s underground arteries in perfect synchronicity, rarely late or cancelled, while birdsong is piped onto the platforms to grant a moment’s calm among the crowds. This is modern Japan – a blur of motion even the sweatbox heat can’t slow.

  At the far end of the Tokyo metro, the last stop on the sprawling tentacle of lines that make up the metropolis’ subway, is Wakōshi Station. Here, the action gives way to a more sedate, suburban pace. Venture out of the station’s south gate and look down. You’ll see a bronze plaque emblazoned with an H: hydrogen. Further down the street is helium; then lithium; then beryllium. Keep following. The clattering pachinko arcades give way to sleepy suburban homes and neat company outposts. Eventually, you’ll find yourself heading toward RIKEN’s Wakō campus, home to its Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science.

  Today, RIKEN is the largest research body in Japan, famed for pioneering work in areas such as pharmaceuticals, agriculture and neuroscience. Almost entirely government funded, its products appear in every corner shop of Japan, from energy drinks that make the body burn fat rather than carbohydrates to cosmetics based on amber. In 2010 the Nishina Center team used their accelerator to shoot carbon ions at cuttings from cherry blossom trees. The mutated blossoms – Nishina otome – bloom twice a year. In a country where cherry blossom viewing is a televised event, this is a big deal.

  I’m not here to talk about any of those discoveries. I want to know why RIKEN joined the race to search for superheavy elements in the 1990s – and how it beat everyone else to the discovery of element 113. It’s the element emblazoned on the last plaque on the walk from the station, a final marker that brings you to an abrupt stop outside RIKEN’s gates.

  ‘It looks like you’ve run out of space for plaques,’ I say to my guide, Yukari Onishi, as she escorts me into the air-conditioned sanctuary of the main building. ‘What happens if you discover another?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she laughs. ‘I guess we’ll have to lead them right up to the building. And after that start putting them indoors.’

  Reminders of the hunt for elements are everywhere: in the foyer of the Nishina Center is a chart of the known nuclides created in Lego, the 3D model stretching up to show the instability of each isotope; with it, you can see the dip around the island of stability, teasing the element makers with its proximity.

  In the US or Europe, discovering a new element barely registers on the evening news. In Japan, element discovery is followed as a national obsession. Hideto En’yo, the Nishina Center’s director, remembers when the team detected one of the atoms that proved their claim. ‘My daughter was in high school,’ he recalls. ‘I was about to visit and I told her I couldn’t because something had happened. And she just said “Oh, you must have created an atom of element 113!” The high school students all know about our research.’

  En’yo is youthful in appearance, his jet-black hair neatly combed, a broad smile on his face. He laughs long and often, more than happy to talk about the crowning achievement of his career. First, though, I need to present my gift. Business is ritualised in Japan, an elaborate and complex riddle of etiquette and social status where even bowing to the wrong degree can cause offence. When you present your business card (and you do, to everyone in the room in turn), you do so holding it on its corners, waiting for them to take it. When you receive a card, you read the name and keep it in a place of pride, never in your trousers. If someone is more important than you are, you always place your business card under their own. And when you visit a company for the first time, you try to bring a gift. As a visitor I’m not expected to do this, but it seems only polite to follow the local customs. En’yo takes my offering – a Royal Society of Chemistry cricket cap – with a smile. It seems the effort is appreciated.

  ‘Discovering an element was a dream from Japan’s history,’ En’yo begins. ‘A dream to recover from a mistake.’ He’s talking about Ogawa’s ‘nipponium’ – failures sit heavy in Japan. ‘And also Nishina, he tried to make a new element. He did it. OK, he couldn’t confirm it, but if you judge him by present knowledge, clearly, he did it. He just didn’t get the naming rights! For Japan, [discovering an element] has been a century-long project.’

  The person the nation put its hopes on was Kōsuke Morita. There is even a manga comic about him, his cartoon alter ego imagined as a tubby figure with a bald pate and thick glasses. A nuclear physicist from Fukuoka, Morita left Kyushu University without completing his thesis (later insisting that he did not have the talent to finish it) and joined RIKEN as a researcher. In 1992 he went to Dubna, where he learned how to make elements under Yuri Oganessian. When it came time for Japan to enter the element discovery race, he was the natural choice to run the show. ‘More than 30 years ago, Kōsuke Morita was charged to look into [element discovery],’ En’yo explains. ‘He needed 10 years to catch up with the world. Twenty years ago, we built the biggest atom smasher in the world. Then we were ready to compete. In 2003 we started the experiment – and we were going to win the game.’

  En’yo isn’t exaggerating. RIKEN’s linear accelerator, RILAC, was easily capable of competing with GSI’s own monster machine. It also has arguably the best detector in the world. But the team hadn’t been able to procure calcium-48, and the machine wasn’t set up to handle radioactive targets. While the Russians and Americans were racing ahead with hot fusion, the Japanese would have to use cold fusion instead.

  It wasn’t a bad call but this made discovery far harder. As the predicted reaction cross sections were much lower, fusion events would be much rarer than for the Dubna–Livermore group. But Morita’s team had near-unlimited beam time. Element-making is like spinning a giant roulette wheel with a million numbers – spin it enough times and eventually your number will come up. If they ran their cold fusion experiment for long enough they were bound to get something. All they had to do was hope their results came before their rivals’.

  It was a long shot.

  In 2003 the Japanese team started bombarding bismuth targets with zinc-70 ions. In 2004 the team got their first hit: an isotope that decayed in 0.34 milliseconds. Even so, it seemed the race had been lost: six months earlier, the Dubna–Livermore group had already reported the discovery of element 113 from the alpha decay of element 115.

  Yet neither team’s claim was accepted immediately. The problem (for both teams) was that the alpha decay ch
ains they reported broke down into undiscovered isotopes – meaning it was impossible to double-check if the results tallied with previous knowledge. There were also some inconsistencies with known data, probably due to the broad range of energies that elements with odd-numbered protons can produce. The IUPAC team arbitrating on element discovery ruled that both teams had produced ‘very promising’ evidence that was ‘approximately contemporaneous’. However, it wasn’t enough to say that the element had been made.

  ‘The discovery was about who made element 113 without reasonable doubt,’ En’yo explains. ‘It’s like an umpire: if they say “you win”, the other side says “you’re wrong”. We were all left wondering … Dubna tried to directly create element 113, and they had two events. A month later, we had one event. They were faster than us, but they gave up.’

  En’yo is half right. While the Dubna–Livermore group moved on, it was to focus on chemical experiments to shore up their discoveries – less taking a break, more gathering intelligence. ‘In our minds, we had discovered two elements with one experiment – how economical! – and we were continuing to perform key experiments,’ says Mark Stoyer. ‘That is not giving up.’

  Both teams continued to push, and by 2005 both had two direct ‘hits’. It still wasn’t enough to prove they had made the element. Going back to En’yo’s umpire analogy, they needed another strike to end the game.

  It didn’t come for seven years.

  * * *

  In 1927 Thomas Parnell, at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, wanted to show his students that sometimes things that appear solid are, in fact, just really viscous liquids. Gathering his class, he heated a sample of pitch – the same stuff used to coat the bottom of ships – and plopped it in a sealed funnel. Three years later, he cut the neck of the funnel, placed the experiment outside the lecture hall and allowed the pitch to start flowing out of the bottom. The first drop fell five years later, in 1938.