Discovery of lawrencium

Lawrencium was first made in 1961 at the University of California, Berkeley, by Albert Ghiorso, Torbjorn Sikkeland, Almon Larsh and Robert Latimer, who bombarded a target of californium with boron nuclei in a heavy-ion accelerator. They named it after Ernest Lawrence, the physicist who invented the cyclotron and founded the laboratory where it was made. Soviet scientists at Dubna reported work on the same element with different results later in the 1960s, and the question of credit was eventually settled in favour of Berkeley. Lawrencium has atomic number 103 and is the last member of the actinide series. It is a synthetic, radioactive element, and its isotopes last for minutes at most, so chemists have studied it only in very small amounts.

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