Soviet nuclear physicist · 1913–1990
Georgy Flerov
Georgy Flerov founded the laboratory in Dubna that rivalled Berkeley in the race for new elements. His team is credited with nobelium, and shares the credit for rutherfordium and dubnium. Element 114, flerovium, is named after the lab that bears his name.
- Elements credited
- 3
- Discoveries
- 1964–1968
- Co-discoverers
- 1
- Where
- Russia; Russia and United States
Discovery timeline
1964 · Russia and United States
Rutherfordium is the first transactinide element. It behaves like a heavier version of hafnium.
1966 · Russia
Nobelium is a synthetic radioactive element. Its discovery was disputed between Swedish, American and Soviet teams.
1968 · Russia and United States
Dubnium is a synthetic, radioactive transition metal studied a few atoms at a time.
The discoveries
Nobelium was claimed by several groups. A team in Stockholm announced it in 1957, but their result could not be repeated. Berkeley and Dubna both produced the element over the following years, and the Dubna experiments of 1966 were eventually judged the conclusive ones.
In 1964 Flerov’s group reported element 104, and in 1968 element 105. Berkeley disputed both claims for decades in what became known as the Transfermium Wars. The international panel that settled the dispute in the 1990s gave the two labs shared credit.
Life and career
Flerov was born in Rostov-on-Don and studied at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. In 1940, with Konstantin Petrzhak, he discovered that uranium can split on its own without being struck by a neutron, a process called spontaneous fission.
In 1942, while serving in the air force, he noticed that Western physicists had stopped publishing on fission and wrote to Stalin urging a Soviet bomb programme. In 1957 he founded the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and led it until 1989.
Also known for
- Co-discoverer of spontaneous fission
- Founder of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions