Darmstadtium (Ds)

Isotopes of Darmstadtium 

Darmstadtium was discovered in 1994 by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg, under the direction of Sigurd Hofmann, at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) (Institute for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany. Its name is derived from Darmstadt, the place of its discovery. The new element was produced by fusing a nickel atom and a lead atom together. Over a period of many days, many billions of nickel atoms were fired at a lead target in order to produce and identify a single atom of darmstadtium.

Darmstadtium is a synthetic element (an element that can be created in a laboratory but is not found in nature) in the same group as nickel, palladium and platinum. It is calculated to have similar properties to these lighter homologues, but unlike them, darmstadtium decays after a small fraction of a thousandth of a second into lighter elements by emitting α-particles which are the nuclei of helium atoms. Due to the short half-lives of its isotopes (and the resulting difficulty in obtaining statistically significant results), experimental chemistry of darmstadtium has not received as much attention as that of the heavier elements copernicium and flerovium.

Properties of Darmstadtium