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Jai Ganesh

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Registered: 2005-06-28

Posts: 52,413

Meitnerium

Meitnerium

Gist

Meitnerium has no practical or commercial uses because it is an extremely rare, highly radioactive element with a very short half-life, meaning only a few atoms have ever been produced. Its sole purpose is for scientific research, particularly in the fields of nuclear physics and the study of superheavy elements to understand atomic nuclei, nuclear reaction dynamics, and the extension of the periodic table.

It has never been found naturally and only a small number of atoms have been produced in laboratories. Its chemistry and appearance are not known with any certainty, although the chemistry is believed to be similar to iridium. Meitnerium is too rare to have any commercial or industrial application.

Summary

Meitnerium is a synthetic chemical element; it has symbol Mt and atomic number 109. It is an extremely radioactive synthetic element (an element not found in nature, but can be created in a laboratory). The most stable known isotope, meitnerium-278, has a half-life of 4.5 seconds, although the unconfirmed meitnerium-282 may have a longer half-life of 67 seconds. The element was first synthesized in August 1982 by the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research near Darmstadt, Germany, and it was named after the Austrian-Swedish nuclear physicist Lise Meitner in 1997.

In the periodic table, meitnerium is a d-block transactinide element. It is a member of the 7th period and is placed in the group 9 elements, although no chemical experiments have yet been carried out to confirm that it behaves as the heavier homologue to iridium in group 9 as the seventh member of the 6d series of transition metals. Meitnerium is calculated to have properties similar to its lighter homologues, cobalt, rhodium, and iridium.

Details

Meitnerium (Mt) is an artificially produced element belonging to the transuranium group, atomic number 109. It is predicted to have chemical properties resembling those of iridium. The element is named in honour of Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner.

In 1982 West German physicists at the Institute for Heavy Ion Research (Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung [GSI]) in Darmstadt synthesized an isotope of meitnerium with a mass number of 266. Using a high-energy linear accelerator, the GSI investigators, under the direction of Peter Armbruster, bombarded bismuth-209 targets with beams of iron-58 ions for roughly 10 days. The resultant fusion reaction between the bismuth and iron atoms yielded only a single nucleus of the new element; however, the sensitivity of the detection technique employed left little doubt as to the validity of the identification. The most stable isotope, meitnerium-276, has a half-life of 0.72 second.

Additional Information:

Appearance

A highly radioactive metal, of which only a few atoms have ever been made.

Uses

At present it is only used in research.

Biological role

Meitnerium has no known biological role.

Natural abundance

Fewer than 10 atoms of meitnerium have ever been made, and it will probably never be isolated in observable quantities. It is made by bombarding bismuth with iron atoms.

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