Named for the Livermore Laboratory

Livermorium honours the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the American partner in the long and productive collaboration with Dubna that produced several of the heaviest elements; the name credits the Livermore scientists whose work on target preparation and detection made the discoveries possible. It stands alongside flerovium and moscovium as one of the elements to emerge from that Russian-American partnership, an unusual case of Cold War rivals turned collaborators at the frontier of matter.

Livermorium has no ancient, mythological or alchemical tradition, being a synthetic element of the twenty-first century with no natural occurrence; its name records not a person or a nation but a specific laboratory, a reminder that the making of new elements has become the work of a few highly specialised institutions pooling their resources across the world. Livermorium's known isotopes decay within milliseconds, and theoretical calculations predict it would behave chemically as a heavier, more metallic relative of polonium, though, as with most of its superheavy neighbours, no experiment has yet gathered enough atoms to test that prediction directly against reality. Fewer than a hundred atoms of livermorium are thought to have ever been created since its first synthesis, each one registered only through the fleeting trail of its own radioactive decay.