Glossary Image explanation Murray Robertson is the artist behind the images which make up Visual Elements. Appearance The description of the element in its natural form.
Biological role The role of the element in humans, animals and plants. Natural abundance Where the element is most commonly found in nature, and how it is sourced commercially. Uses and properties. Image explanation. The design is inspired by the work of Albert Einstein and images collected from early particle accelerators, such as those at Cern and Fermilab. The arrows are from one of these annotated and unattributed images indicating the direction of collisions. A radioactive metal, only a few milligrams of which are made each year.
Biological role. Einsteinium has no known biological role. It is toxic due to its radioactivity. Natural abundance. Einsteinium can be obtained in milligram quantities from the neutron bombardment of plutonium in a nuclear reactor. Help text not available for this section currently. Elements and Periodic Table History. Einsteinium was discovered in the debris of the first thermonuclear explosion which took place on a Pacific atoll, on 1 November Fall-out material, gathered from a neighbouring atoll, was sent to Berkeley, California, for analysis.
Within a month they had discovered and identified atoms of a new element, einsteinium, but it was not revealed until The einsteinium had formed when some uranium atoms had captured several neutrons and gone through a series of capture and decay steps resulting in einsteinium, which has a half-life of By , enough einsteinium had been collected to be visible to the naked eye, and weighed, although it amounted to mere 10 millionths of a gram.
Atomic data. Glossary Common oxidation states The oxidation state of an atom is a measure of the degree of oxidation of an atom. Oxidation states and isotopes. Glossary Data for this section been provided by the British Geological Survey.
Relative supply risk An integrated supply risk index from 1 very low risk to 10 very high risk. Recycling rate The percentage of a commodity which is recycled.
Substitutability The availability of suitable substitutes for a given commodity. Reserve distribution The percentage of the world reserves located in the country with the largest reserves. Political stability of top producer A percentile rank for the political stability of the top producing country, derived from World Bank governance indicators. Political stability of top reserve holder A percentile rank for the political stability of the country with the largest reserves, derived from World Bank governance indicators.
Young's modulus A measure of the stiffness of a substance. Shear modulus A measure of how difficult it is to deform a material. Bulk modulus A measure of how difficult it is to compress a substance. Vapour pressure A measure of the propensity of a substance to evaporate.
Pressure and temperature data — advanced. Listen to Einsteinium Podcast Transcript :. You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry. This week, there's no need to even guess who this element is named after, but it's more than fame that got this element its name - Brian Clegg. At first glance there's nothing odd about naming element 99 in the periodic table 'einsteinium'. After all, Einstein is the most famous scientist that has ever lived.
Yet fame is not usually a good enough reason to make it into the exclusive club of the elements. Not even the new saint of science, Darwin. The clue to Einstein's position here is that many of those with elements named after them played a fundamental role in our understanding of atomic structure.
There is the odd highly doubtful case - but Einstein isn't one of them. He's not on the table because he's famous, but because he was responsible not only for relativity but for laying some of the foundations of quantum theory, which would explain how atoms interact.
What's more, his study of Brownian motion was the first work to give serious weight to the idea that atoms existed at all. For such a great figure, einsteinium verges on being an also-ran. It's one of the actinides, the second of the floating rows of the periodic table that are numerically squeezed between radium and lawrencium. Although only tiny amounts of it have ever been made, it's enough to determine that like its near neighbours in the table it is a silvery metal. Around twenty isotopes have been produced with half lives - that's the time it takes half of the substance to decay - ranging from seconds to over a year, though the most common isotope, einsteinium only has a 20 day half life.
Apart from its name, what makes einsteinium stand out is the way it was first produced. When the Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb, America felt it had to have something even more powerful to keep ahead. Using an atomic bomb as a trigger, the new type of device, referred to as a 'Super' would apply so much heat and pressure to the hydrogen isotope deuterium that the atoms would fuse together, just as they do in the Sun.
It was to be the first thermonuclear weapon. The H bomb. After months of technical testing of components, the first thermonuclear bomb was ready to be tried out at a remote island location, Elugelab on the Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific. Like the innocently named Little Boy and Fat Man - the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - this bomb had a nickname. It was called 'the sausage' because of its long cylindrical shape.
When the bomb exploded on November the first, , it produced an explosion with the power of over 10 million tonnes of TNT - five hundred times the destructive power of the Nagasaki explosion, totally destroying the tiny island. This was very much a test device - weighing over 80 tons and requiring a structure around 50 feet high to support it, meaning that it could never have been deployed - but it proved, all too well, the capability of the thermonuclear weapon.
And in the moments of that intense explosion it produced a brand new element. As part of the aftermath of the test, tonnes of material from the fallout zone were sent to Berkeley, the home of created elements, for testing. There among the ash and charred remains of coral were found a couple of hundred atoms of element 99, later to be called einsteinium.
Such was the secrecy surrounding the test, the element's discovery was not made public for three years. It was in Physical Review of August the first that the discoverer Albert Ghiorso and his colleagues first suggested the name einsteinium. In the intense heat and pressure of the explosion, some of the uranium in the fission bomb that was used to trigger the thermonuclear inferno had been bombarded with vast numbers of neutrons, producing a scattering of heavier atoms.
At the same time, neutrons in the newly formed atoms' nuclei underwent beta decay, producing an electron and a proton. So instead of just getting heavier and heavier uranium isotopes, the result was an alchemist's delight of transmutation, ending up with einsteinium Not surprisingly, this production method is not the norm. Now, when einsteinium is required, plutonium is bombarded with neutrons in a reactor for several years until it is has taken on enough extra neutrons in the nucleus to pump it up to einsteinium.
This only produces tiny amounts - in fact after its discovery it took a good 9 years before enough einsteinium had been produced to be able to see it. In part the tiny quantities of einsteinium that have been made reflect the difficulty of producing it. But it also receives the sad accolade of having no known uses.
There really isn't any reason for making einsteinium, except as a waypoint on the route to producing something else. It's an element without a role in life. We started by thinking of why Einstein might be honoured by appearing in the periodic table.
To get around this, Ghiorso's team set about making element 99 by other means. They discovered that bombarding U with nitrogen ions produced a short-lived isotope of element 99, and they published their findings in with a note to acknowledge that prior work on the element existed 5. A few months later the Mike test was declassified, allowing Ghiorso to report his team's earlier discovery in 6.
He also had the honour of choosing the name, einsteinium Es. Today scientists produce einsteinium by bombarding plutonium with neutrons in a nuclear reactor, then allowing the resulting isotopes to undergo beta decay. This is a slow process.
Indeed, it took until nine years after its initial discovery before scientists managed to make enough einsteinium to observe its form as a silvery metal 4. As well as being scarce, einsteinium is difficult to study because it self-destructs. It has nearly 20 different isotopes, all of which are radioactive. The most stable, Es, has a half-life of about days, but it is difficult to produce and is only available in tiny amounts.
It releases gamma rays and X-rays when it decays, damaging its crystal lattice and hampering any X-ray crystallographic analysis. The intense release of energy W per gram also causes einsteinium to glow 7. Furthermore, because it decays rapidly into berkelium and californium, samples of einsteinium are nearly always contaminated. Einsteinium is mainly used to make heavier elements, such as mendelevium — first discovered by Ghiorso's team when bombarding Es with alpha particles.
In addition, scientists have used its radiation to study accelerated aging and radiation damage, and have examined its potential for medical treatments, although not commercially 7. Outside of basic research, einsteinium has no practical use. So although its name lends it a familiarity, most of us will never come across even a single atom of einsteinium in our lifetimes.
Einsteinium kicked off a trend for naming new elements after famous scientists, and it is hard to imagine a scientist who would not appreciate this honour. But for Einstein, this particular element seems like an ironic choice; he was a pacifist, vehemently opposed to the development of the hydrogen bomb. He even recorded a statement for US television show Today with Mrs. Roosevelt pictured in which he warned that the hydrogen bomb could annihilate life on earth.
So how did he feel about a bomb-born element being named after him? We will never know. He died just a few months before Ghiorso announced einsteinium to the world. Hoffman, D. It was the seventh transuranic element to be discovered. Choppin at Los Alamos. Both were examining debris from a nuclear weapon test of November, They discovered the isotope , which has a half-life of In , enough einsteinium was produced to separate a macroscopic amount of isotope This sample weighted about 0.
The material produced was used to produce mendelevium. Further einsteinium has been produced at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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