The heaviest elements

How long does an atom need to ''exist before it's possible to do any meaningful chemistry on it? Is it possible to learn anything at all about the reactions of an element for which no more than a few dozen atoms have ever existed simultaneously? These are some of the questions colleagues in a few laboratories worldwide attempt to answer as they investigate the chemistry of the heaviest elements--elements produced one atom at a time in accelerators by bombarding radioactive targets with high-intensity beams of heavy ions. All of these elements spontaneously decay; the most stable of them have half-lives of only a few minutes, some that are less stable exist for only milliseconds. So far, no chemical studies have been performed on elements whose longest lived isotopes last only milliseconds because the difficulties of doing chemistry on this time scale under highly radioactive conditions are enormous. Over the past 10 years, however, nuclear chemists have developed new techniques or adapted existing ones to begin to probe the chemical properties of those very heavy elements that have half-lives in the range of seconds to minutes. Although the classic experiments are now nearly 40 years old, they are worth describing, as they were the first of their kind and illustrate many of the techniques that are still used and essential in studying these very short-lived, radioactive elements