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Nuclear chemistry · born 1926

Darleane Hoffman

Hoffman worked at Los Alamos and then at Berkeley on the chemistry and spontaneous fission of the heaviest elements, and her group did much of the work showing that one-atom chemistry is possible at all: an atom’s behavior can be read from where it deposits in a temperature-gradient column or how it partitions between phases, provided the experiment is repeated enough times to be statistically meaningful. She also showed that plutonium-244 occurs in nature, in a Precambrian mineral.

Explore the supporting references at the foot of this article.

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Contribution & context

Her work established the chemical properties of rutherfordium, dubnium and seaborgium, and demonstrated that relativistic effects on the innermost make some superheavy elements deviate from the behavior their group position implies.

rdreview.jaea.go.jp — Rutherfordiumasrc.jaea.go.jp — RutherfordiumRSC Periodic Table — Rutherfordiummedia.iupac.org — RutherfordiumAbout Plutonium-238

Discoveries in context

The end of the seventh row ↗

Elements 104 to 118 were made a few atoms at a time, across a fifty-year competition between three laboratories, and completing the row required agreeing on what counts as proof.

Continue the story

Follow a discovery, compare a material choice, or meet the people behind an idea.

DISCOVERY HISTORYThe end of the seventh row ↗Read how chemistry is done when the sample is a single atom at a time.SCIENTISTAlbert Ghiorso ↗Return to the instrumentation that made single-atom identification possible.

Sources & further reading

  1. rdreview.jaea.go.jp — Rutherfordium ↗rdreview.jaea.go.jpReference explanation · Source checked
  2. asrc.jaea.go.jp — Rutherfordium ↗asrc.jaea.go.jpReference explanation · Source checked
  3. RSC Periodic Table — Rutherfordium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
  4. media.iupac.org — Rutherfordium ↗media.iupac.orgReference explanation · Source checked
  5. About Plutonium-238 ↗NASA ScienceReference explanation · Source checked

Sources and further reading. What the review labels mean