Nobelium is a chemical element of atomic number 102, and the Nobel institute of physics first discovered it in the year 1958 at Berkeley California, United State of America.This element was named in honor of Alfred Nobel, the first researched that was made in Russia by the joint institute for nuclear research made it the first time it was synthesized.
Nobelium is a divalent ion in it aqueous state and very harmful due to its radioactivity. It is a radioactive element metal and the second to the last element in the actinide series, the tenth in the transuranic elements; This element can be produced by bombarding charged particles with lighter elements.
Isotopes of Nobelium
- No 259 has a half-life of 58s
- No 257 has a half-life of 23-s
- No 252 has a half-life of 2.3-s,
- No 254 has a half-life of 55-s
- No 255 has a half-life of 23-s
Nobelium-259 is the most stable isotope of this synthetic radioactive metal. It decays into fermium-255 through alpha decay, into mendelevium-259 through electron capture or through spontaneous fission.
Chemical Properties of Nobelium
|ELECTRONIC CONFIGURATION||Rn 5f14 7s2|
|RELATIVE ATOMIC MASS||259 u|
|MOLECULAR WEIGHT||259 u|
|DENSITY ( G CM-3)||Unknown|
|MELTING POINT||1100 K (827°C or 1520°F)|
|IONIC RADIUS||68 (+1e)|
|ELECTRONIC SHELL||Kr 5s1|
Nobelium is not readily available in the earth crust but it can produce when the heavy-ion linear accelerator is used to bombard a mixture of curium-244 and curium-246 with carbon-12 ions, producing nobelium’s isotope 254 (half-life 55 sec).
The ground state electronic configuration of neutral Nobelium is [Rn].5f14.7s2
Electron binding energy
The electronic binding energy of nobelium given in eV, it is relative to the vacuum level for rare gasses and H2, N2, O2 and CL2 molecules.
Nobelium belongs to the actinide group but classified among the metals and it belongs to period 7 of the element table, it also has an atomic weight of 259.
Uses and role of Nobelium
Nobelium is use for scientific researches only and has no uses domestically.
Electronic shell configuration of Nobelium
3s2 3p6 3d10
4s2 4p6 4d10 4f14
5s2 5p6 5d10 5f14
Nobelium ’s Name and other Findings
Nobelium’s isotope 102 has had more than its fair share of misunderstandings and arguments. To begin with there’s the matter of how to pronounce its current name – nobellium (because it comes from the same root as the Nobel Prize) or nobelium modeled on the way we say helium.
Even the Royal Society of Chemistry’s representatives had a raging discussion on this before plumping for nobelium. And that’s just the pronunciation – the name itself took a fair amount of sorting out.
Nobelium’s isotope 102 is one of the more stable of the short-lived artificial transfermium elements with a half life of 58 minutes for nobelium’259. But how did it get that name? Element names follow four rough patterns. Some – gold, for instance – had their names before we even knew what an element was. Others, like einsteinium, were named after a famous scientist who had a significant role to play in our understanding of atoms, while a third group are named after the place where they were discovered – take californium.
Torbørn Sikkeland and John R. Walton, working at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California, attempted to confirm the Nobel Institute’s discovery. They were unable to produce any isotope of nobelium-element with a half-life of 10 minutes, but were able to produce nobelium-254, with a half-life of three seconds, by bombarding curium-246 with carbon-12. A third group, working at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, also could not duplicate the Nobel Institute’s work but were able to confirm the Berkeley group’s work. Credit for discovering nobelium was eventually given to the scientists working at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, who decided to keep the name nobelium. Today, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory is known as the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at 1 Cyclotron Rd, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States.