Elements: How They Are Discovered and If There is a Limit to Them

In this world, there are lot of elements, 118 to be exact, but not all of them could exist without humans. Starting from the element Americium, which is the 95th element, every single element is man-made. So how do scientists make new elements?

One way to make new elements is through a process called beta decay. Beta decay is the process of an element losing a neutron but gaining a proton. Scientists use this to make new elements by firing neutrons at an element inside of a particle accelerator and hoping that one of the neutrons turns into a proton.  This process takes some time because every neutron that is fired doesn’t hit the target and turn into a proton. Actually, the chance of the neutron even hitting the element and on top of that, beta decaying is so small that scientists fire neutrons to elements constantly for multiple days just to make one element. In addition, running a particle accelerator day and night is very expensive, which means it gets more and more costly the longer you run the particle accelerator. And to make elements that have a higher atomic number, you need to repeat this process multiple times. For example, to make Neptunium (93) from Uranium (92), you only have to have one successful beta decay but if you wanted to make Plutonium (94), you would need to have two successful beta decays. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem but as the number of protons go higher and higher, you get more unstable atoms that have a shorter half-life. A half-life is the time for a sample to be radioactively decayed by fifty percent. In unstable elements these half-lives can be days, hours, minutes, seconds and even milliseconds. Because of this, if you are trying to induce beta decay on an unstable element, you might not have much time and this combined with the fact that the probability of beta decay being low makes is so that it gets almost impossible to make new elements after a certain point using this method.

But beta decay is not the only way of making new elements. Instead of firing one small neutron at a big and unstable element, why not fire a medium sized element into a big but still stable element? This is actually a more reliable way to fuse elements but this method requires much more precise and expensive equipment in order to perform. Using this method, you could actually skip a few elements to make a bigger element and then let that element go through a process called alpha decay,

which is the process of an element losing two protons and neutrons at the same time. It often happens in unstable elements and this process usually leads to a chain and it doesn’t stop until it hits a stable element, and that element is usually lead.

All of this leads us to one question: Can we make new elements forever and ever? While we don’t have a definitive answer, we have one that is accepted by almost everyone and that answer is no. There seems to be a theoretical limit but we don’t exactly know where it is. IUPAC has ruled that an element must be stable enough to exist for more than 10^-14 seconds. If it doesn’t then it isn’t considered an element.

In conclusion, while there are probably more elements waiting to be created, the element hunt can't go on forever and there will come a day when we will see the last element ever to be created.