Nuclear physics · born 1957
Kosuke Morita
Morita led the superheavy element group at RIKEN in Wako, Japan, using the gas-filled recoil separator GARIS with a zinc beam on a bismuth target. The experiment is an exercise in patience at an extreme: the group ran the bombardment intermittently for nine years and recorded three events in total, the last of which produced a decay chain terminating in well-known nuclides and so satisfied the criteria the earlier chains had not.
Explore the supporting references at the foot of this article.
Contribution & context
His group’s events of 2004, 2005 and 2012 established the discovery of element 113, and in 2016 IUPAC assigned the name nihonium — the first element named by a team in Asia.
arXiv preprint — NihoniumarXiv preprint — NihoniumRSC Periodic Table — Nihoniumriken.jp — NihoniumIUPAC — Nihonium
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.
Sources & further reading
- arXiv preprint — Nihonium ↗arXivReference explanation · Source checked
- arXiv preprint — Nihonium ↗arXivReference explanation · Source checked
- RSC Periodic Table — Nihonium ↗Royal Society of ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
- riken.jp — Nihonium ↗riken.jpReference explanation · Source checked
- IUPAC — Nihonium ↗International Union of Pure and Applied ChemistryReference explanation · Source checked
Sources and further reading. What the review labels mean