Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table

So how do you go about creating a new element? Find a 2,100-ton ion machine gun that fires six trillion ions per second at 10% the speed of light towards an unimaginably small target. It' s rare that they hit, and rarer still that target and ion fuse together rather than rip apart. If they do stick together, a new element is made. Then all you need to do is separate this new hybrid from the vast quantities of unreacted material and detect it before it decays - which happens in less than a second. If all of that is a success, well, congratulations! Yo' ve got yourself a brand new element.

Superheavywill be the first book to take an in-depth look at how these elements are discovered, why they matter and where they will take us. It will start by taking us back to the very beginning, with the creation of the atomic bomb and the cold war race between the US and Soviet teams. It will tell the story of the major players, such as Ernest Lawrence who revolutionised the field of particle physics with the creation of the cyclotron; Yuri Oganessian, the guerilla scientis' who opened up a new era of discovery in the field and is the only living scientists to have an element named after him; and Victor Ninov, the disgraced physicist who almost pulled off the greatest fraud in nuclear science. It will bring us in a full circle back to Oak Bridge National Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was developed, and that has more recently been an essential player in creating the new superheavy element 117.

Throughout, Superheavy will explain the complex science of element discovery in clear and easy-to-follow terms. It will walk through the theories of atomic structure, discuss the equipment used and explain the purpose of the research. By the end of the book readers will not only marvel at how far w' ve come, they will be in awe of where we are going and what this could mean for.