Darmstadtium (pronounced
/d?rm'?tæti?m/), formerly known as Ununnilium, is a
chemical element with the symbol
Ds and
atomic number 110.
This synthetic element is one of the so-called super-heavy atoms. It decays quickly Heavier isotopes of darmstadtium have half-lives on the order of ten seconds.
Darmstadtium was first created on November 9, 1994 at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Arheilgen, a northern suburb of Darmstadt, Germany by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg, under the direction of professor Sigurd Hofmann. Four atoms of it were detected by a nuclear fusion reaction caused by bombarding a lead-208 target with nickel-62 ions [1]
In the same series of experiments, the same team also carried out the reaction using heavier nickel-64 ions. During two runs, 9 atoms of 271Ds were convincingly detected by correlation with known daughter decay properties [2]
