A new ɑ-emitting Uranium isotope, created by physicists

A new uranium isotope has been produced, Uranium-214, the highest uranium atom, with just 122 neutrons. 

Naturally occurring uranium consists of 99.3% U-238, 0.7% U-235, and a very small amount of U-234. And they are very heavy compared to the newly found uranium isotope.

This new uranium isotope was produced by Zhiyang Zhang and his colleagues of the Chinese Academy of Science, by the fusion evaporation reaction of W-182 (Tungsten) and Ar-36 (Argon), by firing a beam of Ar-36 at a W-186 target, with a beam energy of 184 MeV.

The researchers observed the nuclei decay and found that uranium-214's half-life is about 0.52 milliseconds, then similar experiments were conducted on U-216 and U-218, with a half-life of 2.25 milliseconds and 0.65 milliseconds, respectively. 

Upon more research, they found that the U-214 and U-216 isotopes experience alpha-decay, they found that the protons and neutrons in each alpha-particle interacted much stronger than in isotopes and other elements with a similar number of protons and neutrons which were studied previously. "Our finding might be the first experimental evidence that the strong proton-neutron interaction can play an important role in alpha decay in [heavy nuclei]," said Zhang.

And they suspect that this proton-neutron interaction could be even stronger in radioactive elements such as isotopes of plutonium and neptunium.

The ɑ-decay chain of U-214 indicated that the alpha particle energy is determined to be  8,532 keV.

Credit: Zhang et al

Refrence: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.152502