Super Heavy Elements: On the 150th Anniversary of the Discovery of the Periodic Table of Elements

摘要

For more than 23 centuries, from Democritus (460–370 BC) to Dalton (1766–1844), the material world around us was believed to consist of the smallest indivisible particles—atoms, those building blocks of the Universe. A total of just 36 chemical elements—types of atoms known to Dalton, were considered the alphabet of the world creation. The periodic table by D. I. Mendeleev [1] that demonstrated the regularity in the chemical behavior of the 63 elements known by that time showed that the atom (element) is not indivisible, since it has an internal structure that is the basis of this regularity. Indeed, 26 years later J. J. Thomson discovered the smallest negatively charged particles in the atom—the electrons [2], and 14 years later Ernst Rutherford proposed the well-known planetary model of the atom [3] in the form of a nucleus that carries almost the entire mass and all the positive charge, and electrons that move around the nucleus at a large distance. In the earliest theoretical model [4], the atomic nucleus was considered to be a spherical uniformly charged drop of a specific liquid-like substance. On the basis of the liquid-drop model G. Gamov himself developed a theory of alpha-decay, the author of the well-known formula C. F. von Weizs?cker calculated the binding energy of nuclei [5], and N. Bohr and J. A. Wheeler developed their liquid-drop-based theory of nuclear fission [6].