• Question: Could you make an element of your own?

    Asked by ravaidah10 to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 21 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 21 Nov 2013:

      Hi ravaidah. Sort of!

      We create new elements every few years by taking low(ish) energy particle accelerators and smashing heavy atoms into each other. Every so often these atoms will combine and form an ultra heavy atom and by extension a new element.

      These new elements are extremely unstable though, decaying in times less than the blink of an eye. It’s almost a certainty that every new element discovered is going to be unstable and radioactive. This is because some of the material that makes up our solar system was created in a supernova, whose energies are much, much higher than we can reach on Earth. So, if stable elements exist, they would have been created in this supernova and we would have discovered them on Earth already.

      Also, there are physical reasons why new heavy elements have to be unstable. The atomic glue that holds atomic nuclei together becomes less and less effective the heavier the element becomes, making instability a guaranteed certainty.

    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 21 Nov 2013:

      There’s now so many chemical elements that I am sometimes wondering what the point is making yet another new one… As Zachary explained, yes, making new elements can be done. It’s a technological challenge to do it, but not really as magic as it probable felt to discover a new naturally occurring element centuries ago.
      The thing is, for us particle physicists atoms and their nuclei are really huge and complicated objects. We don’t really care about them that much. We are more interested in what they are made of. Yeah, protons and neutrons, you might say, but even those are huge and complicated objects, as far as we are concerned. 🙂 Where it gets interesting for us is what’s *inside* protons and neutrons, and this is where we found tiny particles called “quarks”, sticking together thanks to a force that is much much stronger than the electromagnetic force and has different properties to the point that you can never ever extract one of these quarks from a proton or neutron without causing a big mess of particles spraying all over the place. The force carrier particles of this strong force, meaning the strong force equivalent of the photon, are called “gluons”, by the way. Guess why? 😉

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 21 Nov 2013:

      Hi Ravaidah….for a particle physicist elements are not so important. What are much more interesting are what elements, or atoms are made of….so the electrons, quarks, photons, etc. This is where the cutting edge of particle physics is….so I’ll leave the elements to the chemists!

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