Space for One More at the Periodic Table

In a huge international collaboration, a team of scientists have made a few atoms of element number 117, confirming work done by a Russia-USA collaboration in 2010 and securing the new element a place on the periodic table.

The results, published in Physical Review Letters this week, describe how the team of 72 scientists from 17 different labs across 11 countries made and detected the new element, and also found new forms of dubnium (element 105) and lawrencium (element 103) in the process.