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110DsDarmstadtium[281]

Transition metal

Darmstadtium (Ds)

“First made on 9 November 1994 — the fifth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall — and named for Darmstadt, the little German city whose laboratory discovered six elements.”

View group 10 →View period 7 →

Atomic number110

Atomic mass[281]

Group10

Period7

BlockD-block

PhaseSolid

Electron structure

How its electrons are arranged

[Rn] 5f¹⁴ 6d⁹ 7s¹

Shell 1

2e⁻

Shell 2

8e⁻

Shell 3

18e⁻

Shell 4

32e⁻

Shell 5

32e⁻

Shell 6

17e⁻

Shell 7

1e⁻

Computed from the aufbau principle, with known real-world exceptions applied automatically.

🎯 Exam focus

Questions to practise

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1Remembering that the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989 — what happened at GSI exactly five years later, and which beam-and-target pair produced it?

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2Why is each darmstadtium atom, however brief its life, a valuable data point for the nuclear shell model and the search for longer-lived superheavies?

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3Before 2003 the periodic table’s 110th box carried a placeholder name — what was that name, and what does “darmstadtium” honour instead?

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4Darmstadtium’s record isotope Ds-281 lasts about a dozen seconds — explain why that still leaves the element far beyond the reach of test-tube chemistry.

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5Darmstadtium’s configuration ends in 6d⁸7s² — from this, establish its group, period and block, and name the metals it sits beneath.

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6Element 110 honours a whole city rather than one person — explain what Darmstadt did to earn such a rare distinction.

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Study

The notes

About the element

Characteristics

A fully artificial superheavy — darmstadtium is built one atom at a time in fusion reactions and exists nowhere in nature.
Its longest-lived isotope, Ds-281, survives only about a dozen seconds — a marathon among superheavies, yet still hopeless for chemistry.
Predictions give it platinum-like nobility, with oxidation states possible up to +6; its 6d electrons race so fast that relativity reshapes its expected bonds.
Not one chemical experiment has ever been completed on it — before GSI’s 1994 run, everyone knew it only as the placeholder “ununnilium”.

Appearance

Darmstadtium has never been seen as a solid — only a handful of atoms have ever existed, each vanishing within seconds. Calculations predict a dense, silvery Group 10 metal in platinum’s image, probably even more reluctant to react than its famous family members.

Real world

Where you meet it

✦ Uses

Every darmstadtium decay chain is a test of the nuclear shell model — measured half-lives around Ds-281 reveal how long-lived nuclei can grow on the slopes of the predicted island of stability.
Its seat in the middle of Period 7’s d-block makes it a key test case for relativistic quantum-chemistry calculations of the superheavy transition metals.
Its known alpha-decay lines help GSI, RIKEN and Dubna calibrate their detectors before setting out to hunt even heavier nuclei.

◍ Everyday examples

History-minded students love the date: 9 November brought both the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the birth of element 110 in 1994.
Before earning its name, darmstadtium spent years on classroom charts as “Uun”, ununnilium — IUPAC’s systematic placeholder for element 110.
The seventh row of any periodic-table poster carries Ds in its tenth column — a box won by one German city’s laboratory.

Story

History & name

On 9 November 1994 the GSI team led by Sigurd Hofmann, with veterans Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg, directed nickel-62 ions onto a lead-208 target and recorded the alpha-decay chain of the first darmstadtium atom, Ds-269; within weeks, nickel-64 bombardments delivered more atoms of Ds-271. After formal recognition, IUPAC approved the name darmstadtium in 2003 — honouring the city itself, whose GSI laboratory between 1981 and 1996 discovered elements 107 through 112, six new elements in fifteen years. Until that naming, the element had wandered the charts under its systematic placeholder name, “ununnilium”.

Name originNamed for Darmstadt, Germany — home of the GSI laboratory that discovered elements 107 to 112.