Chemistry of superheavy elements

Abstract

The number of chemical elements has increased considerably in the last few decades. Most excitingly, these heaviest, man-made elements at the far-end of the Periodic Table are located in the area of the long-awaited superheavy elements. While physical techniques currently play a leading role in these discoveries, the chemistry of superheavy elements is now beginning to be developed. Advanced and very sensitive techniques allow the chemical properties of these elusive elements to be probed. Often, less than ten short-lived atoms, chemically separated one-atom-at-a-time, provide crucial information on basic chemical properties. These results place the architecture of the far-end of the Periodic Table on the test bench and probe the increasingly strong relativistic effects that influence the chemical properties there. This review is focused mainly on the experimental work on superheavy element chemistry. It contains a short contribution on relativistic theory, and some important historical and nuclear aspects. Matthias Schädel earned his PhD (1979) from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. As a postdoc he worked at the Lawrence Livermore and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories with E. K. Hulet and G. T. Seaborg. Since 1985 he has led the nuclear chemistry group at GSI. He organized and chaired the 1st International Conference on the Chemistry and Physics of the Transactinide Elements (1999). He is the editor of the first comprehensive book on the chemistry of superheavy elements. His research interests focus on all nuclear and chemical aspects of transactinides. © 2006 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.