In China, they created the lightest known isotope of uranium and the alpha emitter uranium-214
The Chinese team fired a beam of argon atoms into the tungsten target. They formed a hitherto unknown isotope uranium-214. It contains only 122 neutrons, making it much lighter than conventional uranium isotopes. The half-life of a new isotope is half a millisecond. During decay, alpha particles are emitted.
–
Heavy Ion Research Facility. Kredit: Chinese Academy of Sciences.
–
The world of isotopes is remarkable, wild and still quite mysterious. Chinese experts have recently created a new, hitherto unknown uranium isotope. Uranium-214 is so far the lightest isotope of this element. The discovery of a new isotope is fascinating in itself, and can also contribute to a deepening of knowledge about the still relatively mysterious alpha particles.
The isotope uranium-214 has 30 neutrons more than protons. It contains a total of 122 neutrons. It has one neutron less than the previous holder of the title of the lightest uranium isotope. At the same time, it has significantly fewer neutrons than the common uranium isotope. Compared to the famous uranium-235, uranium-214 has 51 neutrons less. Neutrons have a certain mass, so uranium-214 is significantly lighter than conventional isotopes of this element.
Alpha decay. Credit: Inductiveload / Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
–
The new isotope uranium-214 is not only lighter than other isotopes of uranium. Its other peculiarity is the specific behavior during radioactive decay, which can reveal the process of alpha decay. During this decay, an alpha particle is released from the nucleus of the atom, consisting of two protons and two neutrons. We have known alpha decay for more than a hundred years. At the same time, we still do not know how alpha particles are formed.
Highly enriched uranium. Credit: US DoE / Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
–
The discovery of the new isotope was attributed to a Chinese team from the Heavy Ion Research Facility (HIRFL) in Lanzhou. They used a Spectrometer for Heavy Atoms and Nuclear Structure (SHANS) in which they fired a beam of argon atoms into a tungsten target. The newly formed isotope uranium-214 has a half-life of half a millisecond. In contrast, the half-life of the most common isotope uranium-238 is about 4.5 billion years, roughly equivalent to the age of the Earth.
Detailed analyzes of the decay of uranium-214 showed that the protons and neutrons in the resulting alpha particles interact much more strongly than in the case of other isotopes or elements with a similar number of protons and neutrons. According to the study’s authors, this is probably due to the specific number of neutrons in uranium-214. The number 122 is close to the “magic number of neutrons”. This equals 126 and represents a particularly stable neutron configuration that is suitable for research.
Literature
Physical Review Letters 126: 152502.
– .
