sea of much shorter-lived, intrinsically unstable isotopes of the superheavy elements.

The group that found the new isotopes is led by Heino Nitsche, head of the Heavy Element Nuclear and Radiochemistry Group in Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division (NSD) and professor of chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. Ken Gregorich, a senior staff scientist in NSD, is responsible for the group's day-to-day research operation at the 88-inch Cyclotron and the Berkeley Gas-filled Separator, the instrument used to isolate and identify the new isotopes. Paul Ellison of NSD, a graduate student in the UC Berkeley Department of Chemistry, formally proposed and managed the experiment and was first author of the paper reporting the results in the 29 October 2010 issue of Physical Review Letters, now available online tosubscribers.

"We were encouraged to try creating new superheavy isotopes by accelerating calcium 48 projectiles with Berkeley Lab's 88-Inch Cyclotron and bombarding plutonium 242 targets inside the Berkeley Gas-filled Separator here," Nitsche says. "This was much the same set-up we used a year ago to confirm the existence of element 114."

The 20-member team included scientists from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Germany's GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research, Oregon State University, and Norway's Institute for Energy Technology. Many of its members were also on the team that first confirmed element 114 in September of 2009. Ten years earlier scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, had isolated element 114 but it had not been confirmed until the Berkeley work. (Elements heavier