Discovery of livermorium

Livermorium was first produced in July 2000 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in a collaboration between Russian scientists and the American Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The team bombarded a target of curium-248 with calcium-48 nuclei and detected the decay of a single atom of the new element with atomic number 116. The result was confirmed by further experiments in the following years, and the discovery was officially recognised in 2011. The element was named livermorium in 2012, in honour of the laboratory and the city of Livermore, California, where it is located. Livermorium is a synthetic, intensely radioactive element, whose isotopes last for fractions of a second, so its properties are largely unknown.

Open on the timeline