Named for the Cyclotron's Inventor

Lawrencium honours Ernest Orlando Lawrence, whose invention of the cyclotron, the machine that accelerates particles in a spiral to smash into target nuclei, provided the essential tool by which most of the transuranium elements were created; the Berkeley laboratory that made so many of them bears his name too. There is a fitting circularity in naming an element for the man whose machine made such elements possible. Lawrencium closes the actinide row, the second of the two detached series at the foot of the periodic table, and beyond it begin the transactinides. It has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a synthetic element of the 1960s; its name is a tribute to the accelerator physics that turned the making of new elements from a dream into a routine, if extraordinarily difficult, craft.

Every heavy-ion accelerator used since to make elements beyond lawrencium, from Berkeley's own later machines to Germany's UNILAC at GSI and Russia's cyclotrons at Dubna, descends conceptually from Lawrence's original device, so that in a real sense his invention, rather than any single laboratory, is the common ancestor of the entire transactinide and superheavy-element enterprise. Lawrencium itself remains chemically the least studied of the actinides, since its extreme instability leaves only the barest handful of atoms available for any single experiment.