Discovery of nihonium

Nihonium is the first element to have been discovered in Asia. A team at the RIKEN research institute in Japan, led by Kosuke Morita, bombarded a target of bismuth-209 with zinc-70 nuclei and detected a decay chain of the new element, atomic number 113, in 2004, with more events in 2005 and 2012. Russian and American scientists at Dubna had also observed chains that included it, as decay products of heavier elements. In 2015 the international chemical authorities recognised RIKEN as the discoverer. The element was named in 2016, using Nihon, one of the two Japanese names for Japan, meaning land of the rising sun. Nihonium is a synthetic and extremely unstable element, whose isotopes last for seconds at most.

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