Abstract
Chemical studies of superheavy elements require fast and efficient techniques, due to short half-lives and low production rates of the investigated nuclides. Here, we advocate for using a tubular flow reactor for assessing the thermal stability of the Sg carbonyl complex – Sg(CO)6. The experimental setup was tested with Mo and W carbonyl complexes, as their properties are established and supported by theoretical predictions. The suggested approach proved to be effective in discriminating between the thermal stabilities of Mo(CO)6 and W(CO)6. Therefore, an experimental verification of the predicted Sg–CO bond dissociation energy seems to be feasible by applying this technique. By investigating the effect of 104,105Mo beta-decay on the formation of 104,105Tc carbonyl complex, we estimated the lower reaction time limit for the metal carbonyl synthesis in the gas phase to be more than 100 ms. We examined further the influence of the wall material of the recoil chamber, the carrier gas composition, the gas flow rate, and the pressure on the production yield of 104Mo(CO)6, so that the future stability tests with Sg(CO)6 can be optimized accordingly.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant 200020_144511). Part of this work was performed at the RI Beam Factory operated by RIKEN Nishina Center and CNS, University of Tokyo, and was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Japan, Grant-in-Aids No. 19002005 and No. 23750072. We thank the ion source and accelerator staff at the RIKEN Nishina Center for accelerator based research for providing intense and stable ion beams. The present work is partially supported by the Reimei Research Program (Japan Atomic Energy Agency), the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research contract No. 06MZ7164, the Helmholtz association contract-No.VH-NG-723, and the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences, Heavy Element Chemistry Program of the U.S. Department of Energy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11079006).
©2015 Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
