livermoriums

Livermorium is a synthetic chemical element with the symbol Lv and atomic number 116. In plural, livermoriums can refer to multiple atoms or isotopes of livermorium. The element is named after the city of Livermore, California, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recognizing its role in its discovery.

Livermorium was first synthesized in 1999 by a joint team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, by bombarding curium-248 with a beam of calcium-48. It is highly radioactive and does not occur in nature; production is limited to specialized laboratories. The known isotopes have extremely short half-lives, typically milliseconds to a few seconds, and decay by alpha emission or spontaneous fission.

Positioned in the periodic table as a member of group 16 (the chalcogens), livermorium is predicted to share some chemistry with tellurium, polonium, and the heavier chalcogens, but relativistic effects are expected to produce notable deviations. Because of its short lifetimes and tiny production yields, detailed chemical properties have been difficult to measure; most knowledge comes from theoretical calculations and limited experiments.

Livermorium is produced in tiny quantities via heavy-ion fusion reactions, usually requiring rare actinide targets and high-intensity accelerators. Due to its instability and scarcity, there are no practical commercial applications; the element is primarily of interest to nuclear and theoretical chemistry and physics.