Overview

Darmstadtium was first created in 1994 at the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany, by a team led by Sigurd Hofmann, by fusing lead and nickel nuclei. It was named after Darmstadt, the city that hosts the laboratory where it and several neighbouring elements were made. Darmstadtium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, known only from a few atoms lasting fractions of a second. Made by fusing lead and nickel nuclei, it has no known chemistry and exists only long enough to register its radioactive decay, so that its properties are inferred from theory and from its position beneath platinum in the table.

Hofmann's team detected darmstadtium from a single atom in November 1994, fusing a lead-208 target with a beam of nickel-62 ions in an experiment that took a full week of continuous accelerator operation to register that one confirmed event, a ratio of effort to result that captures just how far element-hunting had moved from Cronstedt's era of extracting nickel by the pound. Sitting directly beneath platinum in the periodic table, darmstadtium is theoretically expected to share some of platinum's noble, corrosion-resistant character, though no experiment has yet gathered enough atoms to test the prediction directly.