Researchers at Sweden’s Lund University will publish in this week’s edition of Physical Review Letters that the team has confirmed the existence of element 115, currently known as ununpentium. The Russian and American researchers, who believed that they created element 115 in their lab in 2004, did not receive approval from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) for their discovery. This latest work from the Swedish team confirms the 2004 data and supports the discovery of the element.
A very unstable element 115 was created by bombarding americium (95 protons) with calcium (20 protons). The teams measured the existence via photons released by element 115’s decay.
The naming process will only begin after the two joint committees determine if there is enough evidence to support the synthesis of element 115.