Overview

Flerovium was first created in 1998 and 1999 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, by fusing plutonium and calcium nuclei. It was named after Georgy Flerov, the Soviet physicist who founded the Dubna laboratory. Flerovium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, of special interest because it lies near the theorised island of stability. Some flerovium isotopes survive for seconds, unusually long for so heavy an element, which is much of why it draws such interest, and early experiments on single atoms have tried to determine whether it behaves as a volatile metal or, more strangely, like a noble gas.

The island-of-stability prediction dates to nuclear shell-model calculations of the 1960s, which suggested that, just as certain magic numbers of protons and neutrons make ordinary nuclei like lead unusually stable, a similar magic combination near 114 protons and 184 neutrons might grant some superheavy nuclei surprising longevity; flerovium's heaviest confirmed isotopes fall short of that exact neutron count but already show half-lives measured in seconds, tantalisingly longer than most of their neighbours and consistent with the island's edge being close by.