Urbana Campus Research Calendar (OVCRI)

The story of making new elements is a century-long adventure at the edge of the periodic table, where the first artificially produced element (technetium) was made nearly 90 years ago by slamming atoms of molybdenum and hydrogen into each other, hoping to fuse the two nuclei together into something new. Despite our knowledge of atoms and nuclei still being in its infancy, the experiment worked and started a cascade that has added about 30 elements to the periodic table to date—roughly one new element every three years! Today, a quarter of the elements that we now know fit in the periodic table now are human made. This process has not been smooth, there have been periods of intense discovery as new techniques are developed, followed by pauses when the limits of those techniques have been reached. The early 21^st century was one of these periods of intense discovery with element 114-118 being added to the periodic table in only a decade when scientists slammed calcium nuclei into actinide nuclei and successfully fushed them. However, we reached the end of that technique with our current level of technology and now in a 15-year discovery drought while we await the next big leap forward.

 The primary bottlenecks to discovering heavier elements are tiny production cross sections and the scarce availability of suitable targets (e.g., Es, Fm) to reach Z=119 and beyond, with theoretical predictions for these reactions diverging by orders of magnitude and tens of MeV in reported cross sections. This talk outlines how Berkeley Lab is tackling these challenges with a focused program to test alternative projectiles—most notably ⁵⁰Ti on actinide targets like ²⁴⁴Pu—to illuminate how production rates change when moving beyond the conventional 48Ca approach.

We will discuss what motivates new element searches, and what big questions the field is hoping to answer by looking for new elements. Then transition into describing a broad upgrade path spanning ion sources, targetry, recoil separators, detectors, and data acquisition, all designed to maximize yield and enable rapid isotope identification. Early results from the ⁵⁰Ti+²⁴⁴Pu campaign are beginning to reveal when and how cross sections can be enhanced, offering a clearer route toward synthesizing heavier elements. The presentation will connect these experimental advances to theory, discuss remaining barriers, and emphasize how this work trains the next generation of researchers who will push the boundaries of the periodic table.

 Financial Support was provided by the Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics, Nuclear Physics Division, and by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences of the U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231