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Jai Ganesh

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Registered: 2005-06-28

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Nobelium

Nobelium

Gist

Nobelium (No) is a synthetic, radioactive chemical element with atomic number 102, named after Alfred Nobel. It is a transuranic element in the actinide series and has no uses beyond scientific research due to its high instability and short half-life. Nobelium is produced in laboratories through nuclear reactions, such as the bombardment of californium with carbon-12 ions. 

Nobelium has no practical applications outside of fundamental scientific research due to its extreme instability and the minuscule quantities in which it can be produced. Scientists use it to study the properties of super-heavy elements, test the limits of the periodic table, and validate theoretical models of atomic structure and the actinide series.

Summary

Nobelium is a synthetic chemical element; it has symbol No and atomic number 102. It is named after Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and benefactor of science. A radioactive metal, it is the tenth transuranium element, the second transfermium, and is the fourteenth member of the actinide series. Like all elements with atomic number over 100, nobelium can only be produced in particle accelerators by bombarding lighter elements with charged particles. A total of twelve nobelium isotopes are known to exist; the most stable is 259No with a half-life of 58 minutes, but the shorter-lived 255No (half-life 3.1 minutes) is most commonly used in chemistry because it can be produced on a larger scale.

Chemistry experiments have confirmed that nobelium behaves as a heavier homolog to ytterbium in the periodic table. The chemical properties of nobelium are not completely known: they are mostly only known in aqueous solution. Before nobelium's discovery, it was predicted that it would show a stable +2 oxidation state as well as the +3 state characteristic of the other actinides; these predictions were later confirmed, as the +2 state is much more stable than the +3 state in aqueous solution and it is difficult to keep nobelium in the +3 state.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many claims of the discovery of nobelium were made from laboratories in Sweden, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Although the Swedish scientists soon retracted their claims, the priority of the discovery and therefore the naming of the element was disputed between Soviet and American scientists. It was not until 1992 that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) credited the Soviet team with the discovery. Even so, nobelium, the Swedish proposal, was retained as the name of the element due to its long-standing use in the literature.

Details

Nobelium (No) is a synthetic chemical element of the actinoid series of the periodic table, atomic number 102. The element was named after Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel.

Not occurring in nature, nobelium was first claimed by an international team of scientists working at the Nobel Institute of Physics in Stockholm in 1957. They reported synthesis of an isotope of element 102 (either isotope 253 or 255) that decayed by emitting alpha particles with a half-life of about 10 minutes. They named it nobelium. In 1958 American chemists Albert Ghiorso, T. Sikkeland, J.R. Walton, and Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley, reported the isotope 254 as a product of the bombardment of curium (atomic number 96) with carbon ions (atomic number 6) in a heavy-ion linear accelerator. In the same year, a Soviet scientific team led by Georgy Flerov at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, achieved a similar result. Other experiments performed in the Soviet Union (at the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, Moscow, and at Dubna) and in the United States (Berkeley) failed to confirm the Stockholm discovery. Subsequent research in the following decade (primarily at Berkeley and Dubna) led the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry to conclude that Dubna papers published in 1966 established the existence of the isotope nobelium-254 with an alpha-decay half-life of about 51 seconds.

Of the isotopes of nobelium that have been produced, nobelium-259 (58-minute half-life) is the stablest. Using traces of this isotope, radiochemists have shown nobelium to exist in aqueous solution in both the +2 and +3 oxidation states. Cation-exchange chromatography and coprecipitation experiments showed conclusively that the +2 state is stabler than the +3 state, an effect more pronounced than was anticipated in comparison with the homologous lanthanoid element ytterbium (atomic number 70). Thus, No2+ is chemically somewhat similar to the alkaline-earth elements calcium, strontium, and barium. Nobelium metal has not been prepared, but its properties have been predicted to be similar to those of the alkaline-earth metals and europium.

Element Properties:

atomic number  :  102
stablest isotope  :  255
oxidation states  :  +2, +3.

Additional Information:

Appearance

Nobelium is a radioactive metal. Only a few atoms have ever been made. Its half-life is only 58 minutes.

Uses

Nobelium has no uses outside research.

Biological role

Nobelium has no known biological role. It is toxic due to its radioactivity.

Natural abundance

Nobelium is made by bombarding curium with carbon in a device called a cyclotron.

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