The Instrumentation Center

Livermorium

Lv

Contributor: Chien-Shiung Wu Commemorative Forever Stamp, displayed here, was donated by Billy Walsh from his artifact collection.

About the Display: In 2000, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, USA got the privilege of announcing the synthesis of the 116th element. "Livermorium" as it sounds was named to honor all the scientists who worked in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore. Synthesis of livermorium was achieved by bombarding atoms of curium-248 with ions of calcium-48 as stated in the video below.

                                                   Eqn

How Chien-Shiung Wu relates to Lv: The Chinese-born American physicist was well known for her experiments, which utilized radioactive cobalt at near absolute zero temperatures, showing that identical nuclear particles do not always act alike. Those results indicated that the quantum mechanical law of conservation of parity does not hold in the beta decay of cobalt-60. However, physicists Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang received the Nobel Prize in Physics for disproving the law of conservation of parity which Professor Wu confirmed experimentally.

As an advocate for women in science, she was able to get numerous awards including the National Medal of Science, the first honorary doctorate awarded to a woman at Princeton University, the Comstock Prize, and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Also, she was the first woman to work as president of the American Physical Society.

We thought it would be a great recognition to give her a place in our "Ever-Changing Periodic Table" since Chien-Shiung Wu was a graduate student of Ernest Lawrence at the University of California at Berkeley who founded LLNL, Livermore.

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Symbol: Lv

Atomic Number: 116

Atomic Mass: 293 u

Electron Configuration: [Rn] 5f146d107s27p4 

Year Discovered: 2000

Discovered By: Scientists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA

Last Updated: 2/13/24