Moscovium
post transition metalProperties
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Atomic Mass | 290 amu |
| Category | post transition metal |
| Group | 15 |
| Period | 7 |
| Electron Configuration | [Rn] 5f14 6d10 7s2 7p3 |
| Oxidation States | 3, 1 |
| Discovered By | Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2003) |
About Moscovium
Moscovium is what you get when you fire ⁴⁸Ca ions at an ²⁴³Am target and wait for one in 10¹⁹ collisions to fuse — a few atoms a week, on a good week. The Dubna-Livermore collaboration confirmed the synthesis in 2003 and IUPAC accepted the name (after Moscow Oblast) in 2016. The longest-lived isotope, ²⁹⁰Mc, sticks around for about 0.65 seconds before alpha-decaying down a chain that ends, eventually, near the predicted island of stability. Sitting beneath bismuth in group 15, it's expected to behave as a post-transition metal with a strong preference for the +1 state over +3 — relativistic stabilization of the 7s² pair is more aggressive here than the inert pair effect already seen in thallium. None of that has been measured directly because there's no chemistry you can do on something that decays in under a second; everything we say about its bonding comes from Dirac-Hartree-Fock calculations.
Fun Fact
Moscovium gained unexpected pop culture fame when conspiracy theorist Bob Lazar claimed in the 1980s that alien spacecraft used element 115 as fuel — decades before the element was actually created in a laboratory.
Common Uses
- Decay-chain studies probing the predicted island of stability
- Benchmark target for relativistic quantum chemistry calculations
- Hot-fusion cross-section measurements with ⁴⁸Ca beams
- Calibration of recoil separators like DGFRS at JINR
- No commercial applications