 Discovery Information
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| Who: A. Ghiorso, T.Sikkeland, A.E.Larsh, R.M.Latimer
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| When: 1957 |
| Where: Sweden |
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| Name Origin
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| After Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and founded Nobel Prize. |
| "Nobelium" in different languages. |
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| Sources
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| Only very small quantities of nobelium have ever been created. Made by bombarding curium with carbon-13.
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| Uses
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| Little is known about nobelium and only small quantities of it have ever been produced. It has no uses whatsoever outside
of the laboratory.
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| History
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| Nobelium (named for Alfred Nobel) was first synthesized by Albert Ghiorso, Glenn T. Seaborg, John R. Walton and Torbjorn Sikkeland in April 1958 at the University of California, Berkeley. The team used the new heavy-ion
linear accelerator (HILAC) to bombard a curium target (95% 244Cm and 4.5% 246Cm) with 12C ions to make 254No (half-life 55 seconds). Their work was confirmed by Soviet researchers in Dubna.
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| A year earlier, however, physicists at the Nobel Institute in Sweden announced that they had synthesized an isotope of element 102. The team reported that they created an isotope with a half-life of 10 minutes at 8.5 MeV after bombarding 244Cm with 13C nuclei. Based on this report, the Commission on Atomic Weights of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
assigned and accepted the name nobelium and the symbol No for the "new" element. Subsequent Russian and American efforts to
repeat the experiment failed.
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| In 1966 researchers at UC Berkeley confirmed the 1958 experiments and went on to show the existence of 254No (half-life 55 s), 252No (half-life 2.3 s), and 257No (half-life 23 s). The next year Ghiorso's group decided to retain the name nobelium for element 102.
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| Notes
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| Its most stable isotope, 259No, has a half-life of 58 minutes
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| Hazards
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| Nobelium is radioactive. |
