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Title: Superheavy Elements: Present Status and Near Future

Journal Article · · AIP Conference Proceedings
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3275686· OSTI ID:21371355
 [1];  [2]
  1. Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, J.W. Goethe-Universitaet (Germany)
  2. Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, JINR, Dubna, Moscow region (Russian Federation)

The possibilities for the extension of the periodic system into the islands of superheavy (SH) elements, to and beyond the neutron drip line and to the sectors of strangeness and antimatter are discussed in the paper. The multi-nucleon transfer processes in low-energy damped collisions of heavy actinide nuclei may help us to fill the gap between the nuclei produced in the 'hot' fusion reactions and the continent of known nuclei. In these reactions we may also investigate the 'island of stability'. In many such collisions the lifetime of the composite giant system consisting of two touching nuclei turns out to be rather long (>=10{sup -20} s); sufficient for observing line structure in spontaneous positron emission from super-strong electric fields (vacuum decay), a fundamental QED process not observed yet experimentally. A tremendously rich scenario of new nuclear structure emerges with new magic numbers in the strangeness domain. Various production mechanisms are discussed for these objects and for antinuclei in high energy heavy-ion collisions.

OSTI ID:
21371355
Journal Information:
AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1197, Issue 1; Conference: ISACC 2009: 4. international symposium on atomic cluster collisions: Structure and dynamics from the nuclear to the biological scale, Ann Arbor, MI (United States), 14-18 Jul 2009; Other Information: DOI: 10.1063/1.3275686; (c) 2009 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 0094-243X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English