Island of stability and sea of instability

Scientific Leader of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions JINR and Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Oganessian made a report on superheavy elements at today’s meeting of the RAS Presidium.

The scientist presented the history of approaches to the study of matter and the search for heavy elements and spoke about the discovery of superheavy elements in Dubna, which completed the 7th row of the Mendeleev’s Periodic Table. As the speaker noted, physicists have to overcome the “sea of instability” of chemical elements in order to find their “island of stability”. What is meant here is the area of nuclides, where, according to hypotheses, there are superheavy nuclei with a sufficiently long half-life.

Yuri Tsolakovich in his report covered not only the history and current situation, but also the future in the study of superheavy elements. “The Superheavy Element Factory at the Joint Institute is our present. In terms of the luminousity of experiments, it has bypassed all similar facilities in the world by 15 times,” Yuri Oganessian highlighted. He noted that new facilities will be necessary for further development of research in the field of superheavy elements. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research plans to create such a tool: it will be the DC-180 Accelerator. In the future, the cooperation with Rosatom will allow to increase the production of actinoids by 10 times. This will happen thanks to the high-flow SM-3 Reactor, a highly efficient separator, a new DC-280 Accelerator, and the ECR Source. In total, five Regions of the Russian Federation are involved in this work, namely Ulyanovsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Sverdlovsk, Leningrad, and Moscow.

Yuri Oganessian spoke at a meeting of the RAS Presidium among the winners of the Sber Scientific Prize 2022 in the fields of science and technology. On this day, other laureates, RAS Academicians also presented their reports to the participants of the meeting. Alexander Gabibov made a report “Approaches of combinatorial chemistry and biology in the creation of new biocatalysts” and Alexander Holevo spoke about “Quantum systems, channels, information”.

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