0000000000297676
AUTHOR
D. Piguet
Complex chemistry with complex compounds
In recent years gas-phase chemical studies assisted by physical pre-separation allowed for the investigation of fragile single molecular species by gas-phase chromatography. The latest success with the heaviest group 6 transactinide seaborgium is highlighted. The formation of a very volatile hexacarbonyl compound Sg(CO)6 was observed similarly to its lighter homologues molybdenum and tungsten. The interactions of these gaseous carbonyl complex compounds with quartz surfaces were investigated by thermochromatography. Second-generation experiments are under way to investigate the intramolecular bond between the central metal atom of the complexes and the ligands addressing the influence of re…
Miss Piggy, a californium-252 fission fragment source as a generator of short-lived radionuclides
Abstract Carrier-free short-lived nuclides are employed in many different fields of modern nuclear chemistry. The two main production strategies are either thermal neutron-induced fission of 235U or 239Pu at nuclear reactors or spallation neutron sources or charged particle-induced nuclear reactions at accelerator facilities. An alternative method is to use a spontaneously fissioning nuclide. A facility applying this technique (“Miss Piggy”) was built at the University of Berne (Switzerland). Californium-252 (252Cf), which has a 3% fission branch and a half-life of 2.645 a, is used for the production of short-lived fission products that are stopped in an adjacent recoil chamber. Short-lived…
Chemical investigation of hassium (element 108).
The periodic table provides a classification of the chemical properties of the elements. But for the heaviest elements, the transactinides, this role of the periodic table reaches its limits because increasingly strong relativistic effects on the valence electron shells can induce deviations from known trends in chemical properties. In the case of the first two transactinides, elements 104 and 105, relativistic effects do indeed influence their chemical properties, whereas elements 106 and 107 both behave as expected from their position within the periodic table. Here we report the chemical separation and characterization of only seven detected atoms of element 108 (hassium, Hs), which were…
Attempts to chemically investigate element 112
Summary Two experiments aiming at the chemical investigation of element 112 produced in the heavy ion induced nuclear fusion reaction of 48Ca with 238U were performed at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI), Darmstadt, Germany. Both experiments were designed to determine the adsorption enthalpy of element 112 on a gold surface using a thermochromatography setup. The temperature range covered in the thermochromatography experiments allowed the adsorption of Hg at about 35 °C and of Rn at about -180 °C. Reports from the Flerov Laboratory for Nuclear Reactions (FLNR), Dubna, Russia claim production of a 5-min spontaneous fission (SF) activity assigned to 283112 for the 238U(48Ca,3n)…