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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Historical Reminiscences: The Pioneering Years of Superheavy Element Research

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This chapter deals with the pioneering years of superheavy element research, from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. The prediction that superheavy nuclides could form an island around element 114 with half-lives long enough to have survived in Nature since nucleosynthesis led to intensive searches—not unlike “gold fever”—for such relic nuclei in all sorts of natural environments. Positive claims were raised from time to time but could not stand up under further scrutiny. Numerous attempts to synthesize superheavy nuclei by large leaps from the mainland of elemental stability to the island of superheavy elements went without success as well. The discovery of three more transactinide elements, 107–109, from 1981 to 1984 encouraged chemists to resume research on the chemistry of transactinide elements with a new approach: automated chemical procedures.