TOKYO—A team of Japanese scientists have met the criteria for naming a new element, the synthetic highly radioactive element 113, more than a dozen years after they began working to create it.
Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at the government-affiliated Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, was notified of the decision on Thursday by the U.S.-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
“Now that we have conclusively demonstrated the existence of element 113, we plan to look to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond,” Morita said in a statement.
A joint working group of the IUPAC and International Union of Pure and Applied Physics also announced decisions on recognition of discoveries of elements 115, 117, and 118.
Discoveries of atomic elements have often involved competition between scientists. The news is a morale booster for Riken, which has undergone a reorganization of some of its research following a scandal over stem-cell research.
“To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal,” Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry told reporters.
Riken had earlier said japonium might be proposed as a name for element 113, which provisionally had been named ununtrium.
