04/08/2022
By Joanne Gagnon-Ketchen
This colloquium will be virtual. To join: Contact Joanne Gagnon Ketchen for the link
Jacklyn Gates, Chemist Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will give a talk on "Modern Day Alchemy: Making and Investigating the Heaviest Elements on Earth."
Abstract: For millennia, alchemists across the world have been searching for a way to transmute one element into another element. Less than 100 years ago, we finally succeeded. While there are now 118 known elements in the periodic table, only 90 of these exist naturally here on earth. The other 28 elements were created over the years by scientists in laboratories around the world by combining or splitting apart other elements. This expansion of the periodic table is still ongoing: over the last two decades, six new elements, commonly called superheavy elements, have been added. These superheavy elements can only be formed one-atom-at-a-time in complete-fusion-evaporation reactions. Once formed, the atoms typically exist for just seconds or less before they decay. Despite these challenges, there is ongoing research to learn more about the nuclear and chemical properties of the heaviest elements. Here I will discuss why superheavy elements are interesting, how they are produced in laboratories around the world, and how our group at Berkeley studies these superheavy elements.
Bio: Jacklyn Gates received her B.S. in chemistry from Westminster College in 2004 and her Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. She held a postdoctoral research position at the Technical University of Munich and the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research before joining the Berkeley Lab staff in 2010. She is currently the group leader for the Heavy Element Group in the Nuclear Science Division at Berkeley Lab and recently won a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Her interests include studying the production, chemistry and nuclear structure of the heaviest elements.