Overview

Nihonium was the first element to be discovered in Asia, created in 2004 at the RIKEN laboratory in Japan by a team led by Kosuke Morita, by fusing bismuth and zinc nuclei. Its name comes from Nihon, one of the Japanese names for Japan, meaning the Land of the Rising Sun. Nihonium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, known only from a very small number of atoms. Its isotopes last only seconds and it has no studied chemistry; expected to resemble a heavy, unstable relative of thallium, it was confirmed only after the RIKEN team spent years of patient accelerator runs to register a mere three atoms.

Morita's team spent about nine years attempting the specific fusion reaction that finally worked, registering only three confirmed decay chains across that entire span despite running the experiment for a combined total of hundreds of days, a testament to how vanishingly improbable each successful fusion event is at this end of the periodic table. A rival claim from the Dubna-Livermore collaboration, which had produced what appeared to be the same element as a decay product of element 115 experiments, was ultimately set aside in 2015 when IUPAC awarded priority, and so the right to name the element, to the Japanese team.