151 years of the periodic table – from a nuclear physics perspective

General ILL webinar
Organised by College III

Wednesday, 18 November 2020 at 14h00

https://ill.zoom.us/j/96580978452

A. Lopez-Martens
CSNSM, France

At the dawn of the 20th century, most scientists believed that matter was made up of atoms and that what distinguished the atoms of different elements was their mass. It was this mass that was used to classify the elements. The chemists of the time quickly became aware of periodicities in the chemical behaviour of certain elements that they tried to translate into tables, the most famous of which was that of the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. In Mendeleev’s table, the elements were arranged by increasing atomic mass, some cells were left empty and the position of the elements was given by the letter Z, from the German word zahl (number). In this lecture, I will show how discoveries in nuclear physics have transformed our understanding of the atom, how they have given its true meaning to the periodic table and how they have completed the 7 periods of the periodic table up to the last known element: oganesson.

Yung-Hee  KIM (College III Secretary)