Seaborgium Sg

Discovery

In 1974 a team including Albert Ghiorso at Berkeley and Kenneth Hulet of Lawrence Livermore made seaborgium-263 by bombarding californium-249 with oxygen-18 ions. That same year a Dubna group claimed element 106 through 'cold fusion' of lead with chromium-54, but in 1993 the joint working group credited the Berkeley–Livermore team.

When the Americans proposed Seaborg's name in 1994, IUPAC initially objected to naming an element after a living person and suggested an alternative. The American Chemical Society and others protested strongly, and in the final settlement of 1997 seaborgium became official. Seaborg died in 1999.

Origin of the name

The element honours Glenn Seaborg, the American chemist who took part in discovering about ten transuranium elements, including plutonium, americium and curium, and who formulated the actinide concept. The symbol is Sg. Seaborg enjoyed pointing out that his mail could be addressed using only element names: seaborgium, lawrencium (for the laboratory), berkelium, californium, americium.

Main uses

• Basic research: It has no uses outside science.
• Chemistry: Single-atom experiments showed seaborgium forming volatile oxychlorides and carbonyl compounds much like tungsten and molybdenum, confirming that it behaves as a group 6 element.

Isotopes

There are no stable isotopes. The heavier known isotopes, such as seaborgium-267, -269 and -271, are the longest-lived, with half-lives of a few minutes; they have mostly been seen in the decay chains of heavier elements. Seaborgium-263, the first isotope found, lasts about a second.

In everyday life

It does not exist in nature; only a few atoms at a time are made in accelerators and they decay almost immediately, so it has no connection with daily life or health.