An island of stability and a sea of instability. Yuri Oganessian made a report at the RAS

On January 31, 2023 Academician Yu.Ts.Oganessian, FLNR Scientific Leader made a report about superheavy elements during the Meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The scientist presented to the audience the history of approaches to the study of matter and search for heavy elements and also told about the discovery of superheavy elements in Dubna which completed the 7th row of Mendeleev table. As the speaker noted, the physicists had to get over the “sea of instability” of chemical elements to find their “island of stability”. This concerns the region of nuclides where according to hypotheses there are superheavy nuclei with a rather long half-life.

Yuri Tsolakovich’s report covered not only the history and current state of affairs but the future of the study of superheavy elements as well. “The Superheavy Element Factory at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research is our present. By the luminosity of the experiments it surpassed all similar setups in the world by 15 times,”- emphasized Yuri Oganessian. He noted that for the further development of the study of superheavy elements the new setups will be required. JINR plans to create such an instrument – it will be DC-180 accelerator. Future cooperation with Rosatom will make it possible to increase the production of actinides by 10 times. It will happen thanks to high-flux SM-3 reactor, high-performance separator, new DC280 accelerator and ECR-source. In total five regions of the Russian Federation are involved in this work: Ulyanovsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Sverdlovsk, Leningrad and Moscow.

Yuri Oganessian spoke at the Meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences among the laureates of Sber Scientific prize 2022.