Overview

Meitnerium was first created in 1982 at the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt by the team of Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Munzenberg, by fusing bismuth and iron nuclei. It was named after the physicist Lise Meitner, who with Otto Frisch first explained nuclear fission. Meitnerium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, known only from a very small number of atoms. Its isotopes survive at most a few seconds, and no chemistry of it has yet been done; each atom is identified only indirectly, by the cascade of alpha decays that follows its creation, and it takes weeks of accelerator time to make even a handful.

The original 1982 experiment that identified meitnerium detected the element from a single atom, one of the most extreme examples in the whole history of chemistry of a substance being characterised from so minimal a sample, and it took years of further, painstaking accelerator runs at GSI to confirm the finding beyond doubt before the element could be formally accepted and named. Producing even that one atom required bombarding a bismuth target with a beam of iron ions for an extended period, a probability so low that success depended as much on patience as on technique. Meitnerium's longest-lived known isotope still survives only a few seconds, leaving essentially nothing of its chemistry studied directly.