Three new elements approved: darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn)

Three new elements approved
from the institute of physics (IOP)

Elements 110, 111 and 112 have been named darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn) respectively.

The General Assembly approved these suggestions from the Joint Working Party on the Discovery of Elements, which is a joint body of IUPAP and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).

Dr Robert Kirby-Harris, Chief Executive at IOP and Secretary-General of IUPAP, said, “The naming of these elements has been agreed in consultation with physicists around the world and we’re delighted to see them now being introduced to the Periodic Table.”

The General Assembly includes delegates from national academies and physical societies around the world. IUPAP has 60 member countries altogether.

The five day meeting, which has been running from Monday 31 October and will finish today, has included presentations from leading UK physicists, and the inauguration of IUPAP’s first female President, Professor Cecilia Jarlskog from the Division of Mathematical Physics at Lund University in Sweden.

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from wikipedia:
Darmstadtium is a chemical element with the symbol Ds and atomic number 110. It is placed as the heaviest member of group 10 but a sufficiently stable isotope is not known which would allow chemical experiments to confirm its place. This synthetic element is one of the so-called super-heavy atoms and was first synthesized in 1994, at a facility near the city of Darmstadt, from which it takes its name.

Roentgenium is a synthetic radioactive chemical element with the symbol Rg and atomic number 111. It is placed as the heaviest member of the group 11 (IB) elements, although a sufficiently stable isotope has not yet been produced in a sufficient amount that would confirm this position as a heavier homologue of gold...The name roentgenium (Rg) was proposed by the GSI team[8] in honor of the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen.

Copernicium is a chemical element with symbol Cn and atomic number 112. It is an extremely radioactive synthetic element that can only be created in a laboratory. The most stable known isotope, copernicium-285, has a half-life of approximately 29 seconds, but it is possible that this copernicium isotope may have an isomer with an even longer half-life, 8.9 min. It was first created in 1996 by the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI). It is named after the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus..."to honor an outstanding scientist, who changed our view of the world".