Lecture series on heavy and super heavy elements (3/3) by Dr.
Yuichiro Nagame (JAEA) Friday, 11 May 2012 from to
(Europe/Zurich) at CERN ( 26-1-022 ) at CERN ( 26-1-022 )
Nuclear Chemistry of the Heaviest Elements at JAEA Studies on
the chemical properties of the heaviest elements offer unique
opportunities to obtain information about trends in the periodic
table of the elements at the limits of nuclear stability, and to
assess the magnitude of the influence of relativistic effects on
chemical properties. From the calculations of electron
configurations of heavier elements, it is predicted that sudden
changes in the structure of electron shells may appear due to
relativistic effects which originate from the increasingly
strong Coulomb field of the highly charged atomic nucleus. Thus,
it is expected that heavier elements show a drastic
rearrangement of electrons in their atomic ground states, and,
as electron configurations are responsible for chemical behavior
of elements, such relativistic effects can lead t