In honour of scientist and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), the discovering team around Professor Sigurd Hofmann suggested the name copernicium with the element symbol Cp for the new element 112, discovered at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt. It was Copernicus who discovered that the Earth orbits the Sun, thus paving the way for our modern view of the world. Thirteen years ago, element 112 was discovered by an international team of scientists at the GSI accelerator facility. A few weeks ago, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, IUPAC, officially confirmed their discovery. In around six months, IUPAC will officially endorse the new element's name. This period is set to allow the scientific community to discuss the suggested name copernicium before the IUPAC naming.

Darmstadt, June 10, 2009

The new element 112 discovered by GSI has been officially recognized and will be named by the Darmstadt group in due course. Their suggestion should be made public over this summer.

Working with element 112 is not easy - it does not occur in the wild and only a few atoms at a time can be made. In this new paper a large group of Swiss, Russian, and Polish authors report:

Dr. Thomas Neff, a research affiliate at the MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology) Center for International Studies states that limited supplies of uranium fuel for nuclear power plants may thwart the renewed and growing interest in nuclear energy in the United States and other nations.

Experiments conducted at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research) at Dubna in Russia indicate that element 118 (ununoctium, Uuo) was produced. Not too much though, one atom in the spring of 2002 and two more in 2005.

The 2002 experiment involved firing a beam of ⁴⁸₂₀Ca at ²⁴⁹₉₈Cf. The experiment took 4 months and involved a beam of 2.5 x 10¹⁹ calcium ions to produce the single event believed to be the synthesis of ²⁹⁴₁₁₈Uuo.

²⁴⁹₉₈Cf + ⁴⁸₂₀Ca → ²⁹⁴₁₁₈Uuo + 3¹n

China is expecting to complete work on the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL) - Cooler Storage Ring (CSR) soon. Its director, Zhan Wenlong, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said "our target is to form new heavy elements and expand the Periodic Table" and "the building of large science facilities demonstrates not only our specific technological know-how, but also the prowess of our basic research".

Source: http://english.people.com.cn/200606/07/eng20060607_271658.html

It is claimed that recent experimental results involving the bomabardment of americium-243 with calcium-48 ions are consistent with the formation in the laboratory of a few atoms of elements 113 and 115. In experiments conducted at the JINR U400 cyclotron with the Dubna gas-filled separator between July 14 and Aug. 10, 2003, atomic decay patterns were observed that are said to confirm the existence of element 115 and element 113. In these decay chains, element 113 is produced via the alpha decay of element 115.

The results are published in the Feb. 1, 2004 issue of Physical Review C: "Experiments on the synthesis of element 115 in the reaction ²⁴³Am(⁴⁸Ca,xn)^291–x115", Yu. Ts. Oganessian, V. K. Utyonkoy, Yu. V. Lobanov, F. Sh. Abdullin, A. N. Polyakov, I. V. Shirokovsky, Yu. S. Tsyganov, G. G. Gulbekian, S. L. Bogomolov, A. N. Mezentsev, S. Iliev, V. G. Subbotin, A. M. Sukhov, A. A. Voinov, G. V. Buklanov, K. Subotic, V. I. Zagrebaev, M. G. Itkis, J. B. Patin, K. J. Moody, J. F. Wild, M. A. Stoyer, N. J. Stoyer, D. A. Shaughnessy, J. M. Kenneally, and R. W. Lougheed, Phys. Rev. C, 2004, 69, 021601(R).

The team of Berkeley Lab scientists that announced two years ago (1999) the observation of what appeared to be Element 118 (heaviest undiscovered transuranic element at the time) has retracted its original paper after several confirmation experiments failed to reproduce the results. This means that the pages for element 118 and parts of the data for element 116 are wrong. Please see this page for more details.