Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions

At GNS a search for element 114 was started in November-December, 1998. The experiments were performed in collaboration between the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, FLNR, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, LLNL, Livermore, California. A 244Pu target was irradiated for a period of 34 days with a 48Ca beam. One decay chain was extracted from the data. The chain was claimed to be a candidate for the decay of289114. The measured cross section was 1 pb [47],... 

The Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (FLNR) in Dubna, Russia, has recently announced the observation of relatively long-lived isotopes of elements 108, 110, 112, 114, and 116 [63-66] confirming the over 30 years old theoretical prediction of an island of stability of spherical superheavy elements. Due to the half-lives of the observed isotopes in the range of seconds to minutes, chemical investigations of these heaviest elements in the Periodic Table appear now to be feasible. The chemistry of these elements should be extremely interesting due to the predicted dramatic influence of relativistic effects [67], In addition, the chemical identification of the newly discovered superheavy elements is highly desirable as the observed decay chains [63-66] cannot be linked to known nuclides which has been heavily criticized [68,69],... 

Element 106, named seaborgium to honor Glen Seaborg, was created in 1974 by the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, in the Soviet Union, and at the Lawrence Berkeley and Livermore Laboratories, in the United States. Seaborgium isotopes are created using a cyclotron and can exist from about 0.9 seconds up to about 20 seconds before they decay into other elements. This is enough time to determine the properties of seaborgium and to confirm that it qualifies as an element. 

At about the same time, another claim to the discovery of element 106 was made by a Russian group working at the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia — Georgiy N. Flerov, Yuri Ts. Oganessian, Yu. P. Tretyakov, A. S. Iljinov, A. G. Demin, A. A. Pleve, S. P. Tret yakova, V. M. Plotko, M. P. Ivanov, N. A. Danilov, and Yu. S. Korotkin. They reported the observation of a spontaneous fission activity with a half-life of 4-10 ms, produced by bombarding 82 Pb with ItCr, and which they assigned to 106 on the basis of reaction systematics. 

Lawrencium - the atomic number is 103 and the chemical symbol is Lr. The original chemical symbol was proposed as Lw but it was changed because W is an unusual occurrence in many languages and it is a cumbersome spoken word. The name derives from the American physicist Ernest O. Lawrence , who developed the cyclotron. Credit for the first synthesis of this element in 1971 is given jointly to American chemists from the University of California laboratory in Berkeley, California under Albert Ghiorso and the Russian scientific team at the JINR (Joint Institute for Nuclear Reactions) lab in Dubna, Russia under Georgi N. Flerov, after a series of preliminary papers presented over a decade. The longest half-life associated with this unstable element is 3.6 hour Lr. 

---