CHEMISTRY GLOSSARY

Lawrencium was discovered by Albert Ghiorso, Torbjorn Sikkeland, Almon E. Larsh and Robert M. Latimer (USA) in 1961. Named in honour of Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron. It is synthetic radioactive metal. Lawrencium was produced by bombarding a mixture of three isotopes of californium with boron-10 and boron-11 ions. Eight isotopes of lawrencium have been synthesized to date, with the longest-lived being lawrencium-256, which has a half-life of about 30 seconds.