Nobelium (No)

Nobelium does not occur naturally in the Earth’s crust. It was first synthesized in 1966 by Russian scientists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia under Georgi Flerov. Earlier claims to have synthesized “nobelium” beginning in 1957 were shown to be erroneous. This element was originally named for Alfred Nobel (Fig. IUPAC.102.1), the inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel prizes. The name was later retained because of its widespread use throughout the scientific literature [636], [638]. There are no uses for isotopes of nobelium outside of scientific research.

Nobelium is named after Alfred Nobel.

In 1957, a group of scientists working at the Nobel Institute of Physics in Stockhlom, Sweden, announced the discovery of a new element. They produced this new element, which they named nobelium, by bombarding a target of curium-244 with ions of carbon-13 with a device called a cyclotron. The isotope they created had a half-life of 10 minutes. In 1958, another group of scientists, Albert Ghiorso, Glenn T. Seaborg, Torbørn Sikkeland and John R. Walton, working at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California, attempted to confirm the Nobel Institute's discovery. They were unable to produce any isotope of nobelium with a half-life of 10 minutes, but were able to produce nobelium-254, with a half-life of three seconds, by bombarding curium-246 with carbon-12. A third group, working at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, also could not duplicate the Nobel Institute's work but were able to confirm the Berkeley group's work. Credit for discovering nobelium was eventually given to the scientists working at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, who decided to keep the name nobelium. Today, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory is known as the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Nobelium's most stable isotope, nobelium-259, has a half-life of about 58 minutes. It decays into fermium-255 through alpha decay, into mendelevium-259 through electron capture or through spontaneous fission.

Named after Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite. Nobelium was unambiguously discovered and identified in April 1958 at Berkeley by A. Ghiorso, T. Sikkeland, J.R. Walton, and G.T. Seaborg, who used a new double-recoil technique. A heavy-ion linear accelerator (HILAC) was used to bombard a thin target of curium (95%244Cm and 4.5% 246Cm) with 12C ions to produce 102No according to the 246Cm(12C, 4n) reaction.

In 1957 workers in the United States, Britain, and Sweden announced the discovery of an isotope of element 102 with a 10-minute half-life at 8.5 MeV, as a result of bombarding 244Cm with 13C nuclei. On the basis of this experiment, the name nobelium was assigned and accepted by the Commission on Atomic Weights of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

The acceptance of the name was premature because both Russian and American efforts now completely rule out the possibility of any isotope of Element 102 having a half-life of 10 min in the vicinity of 8.5 MeV. Early work in 1957 on the search for this element, in Russia at the Kurchatov Institute, was marred by the assignment of 8.9 +/- 0.4 MeV alpha radiation with a half-life of 2 to 40 sec, which was too indefinite to support discovery claims.

Confirmatory experiments at Berkeley in 1966 have shown the existence of 254102 with a 55-s half-life, 252102 with a 2.3-s half-life, and 257102 with a 23-s half-life.

Following tradition giving the right to name an element to the discoverer(s), the Berkeley group in 1967, suggested that the hastily given name nobelium along with the symbol No , be retained.