Livermorium (Lv)
“Element 116 — born at Dubna in 2000 from curium and an exotic calcium beam, then named for a famous Californian science laboratory.”
How its electrons are arranged
Computed from the aufbau principle, with known real-world exceptions applied automatically.
The notes
Characteristics
- One of the rarest substances ever made: only a few dozen livermorium atoms have existed, each assembled in a single accelerator collision.
- Its atoms survive tens of milliseconds at best — the longest-lived isotope, Lv-293, still decays within a tenth of a second.
- It is the heavyweight of the oxygen family: Group 16 runs oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium, polonium and finally livermorium.
- Relativity is predicted to sap its bonding power, making livermorium a volatile, weakly metallic solid rather than a straightforward partner for sulfur and selenium chemistry.
Livermorium has existed only as single atoms that vanish almost as soon as they are born. Theorists expect a dense, soft, silvery post-transition metal below polonium in Group 16 — but with relativistically weakened bonds, so unlike a true chalcogen that its chemistry may surprise everyone.
Where you meet it
✦ Uses
- Charting the island of stability: comparing Lv-290, Lv-292 and Lv-293 lifetimes with flerovium and oganesson isotopes reveals how firmly the island’s shores hold.
- Its alpha-decay chains act as fingerprints — a detector that correctly identifies livermorium chains can be trusted when hunting still-heavier nuclei.
- Every synthesis run tests the nuclear reaction models of “hot fusion”, sharpening the recipes used in attempts on elements 119 and 120.
- The curium-target methods perfected for livermorium guided the design of the later berkelium targets that produced tennessine.
◍ Everyday examples
- When livermorium and flerovium were named in May 2012, periodic-table posters were reprinted worldwide — the chart in your Bangladeshi classroom dates from that update.
- Quiz teams remember Lv as the element named after the Lawrence Livermore laboratory — the Californian lab credited as co-discoverer of elements 114 through 118.
- Group 16 in the NCTB textbook — the oxygen family — now officially ends at livermorium in the seventh period.
History & name
In 2000 the Dubna–Livermore collaboration led by Yuri Oganessian fired calcium-48 ions from the U-400 cyclotron at a curium-248 target and caught a lone atom of Lv-292, which alpha-decayed through flerovium down into known nuclei within milliseconds; further campaigns over the following years added more atoms and chains. IUPAC credited the discovery in June 2011, and together with flerovium the element was officially named livermorium on 31 May 2012 — honouring the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, whose scientists had partnered with Dubna on the superheavy hunt since the 1990s.