Tsirkooniumit

Tsirkooniumit is a hypothetical chemical element that appears in the literature on extended periodic table research. It is sometimes described as element 172, belonging to the transactinide series, and it would be expected to have an atomic number of 172 with a putative electron configuration that extends the 7f and 8d subshells. The name derives from the Greek word “tsirkos”, meaning “twisting”, referring to the element’s predicted highly irregular electronic shell structure. Because no isotope of tsirkooniumit has yet been synthesized, its existence remains theoretical.

According to relativistic density functional calculations, tsirkooniumit would have a very high melting point, potentially over 2000 °C, and would exist only in ground-state or very short-lived excited states. Its isotope tsirkoonium-517 is predicted to have a half‑life on the order of milliseconds, making experimental confirmation extremely challenging. The element’s electronic configuration might allow for unique chemical bonding patterns, with possible valence states of +3, +4, and +5.

In theoretical studies, tsirkooniumit is occasionally explored as a candidate for stabilizing unusual cluster compounds in nanochemistry. It has also been used in models of neutron‑capture nucleosynthesis in supernova events, where its large neutron‑rich isotopes could serve as seed nuclei for reactions beyond iron. Because of the extreme difficulty of producing it, no practical applications have been reported, and tsirkooniumit remains a topic of interest primarily within high‑energy physics and advanced computational chemistry.