Discovery of nobelium

Nobelium has a complicated discovery history. In 1957 an international team working at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm announced that they had made element 102 and named it after Alfred Nobel, but other laboratories could not reproduce their results. In 1958 Albert Ghiorso, Glenn Seaborg, Torbjorn Sikkeland and John Walton at Berkeley produced it by bombarding curium with carbon nuclei, and Soviet researchers at Dubna, led by Georgy Flerov, reported their own results. The name nobelium, however, had become widely used, and it was kept. Nobelium is a synthetic, radioactive element, whose longest-lived isotopes last for only a few minutes, and so only small numbers of atoms can be studied. It is a member of the actinide series.

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