In honour of scientist and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), the discovering team around Professor Sigurd Hofmann suggested the name copernicium with the element symbol Cp for the new element 112, discovered at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt. It was Copernicus who discovered that the Earth orbits the Sun, thus paving the way for our modern view of the world. Thirteen years ago, element 112 was discovered by an international team of scientists at the GSI accelerator facility. A few weeks ago, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, IUPAC, officially confirmed their discovery. In around six months, IUPAC will officially endorse the new element's name. This period is set to allow the scientific community to discuss the suggested name copernicium before the IUPAC naming.

Darmstadt, June 10, 2009

The new element 112 discovered by GSI has been officially recognized and will be named by the Darmstadt group in due course. Their suggestion should be made public over this summer.

The units of resistivity don't come out right.

10^-8 Ohm * m
or
m Ohm * cm

the 'm' should be a 'mu', but unfortunately they both look the same in the latin alphabet.

Working with element 112 is not easy - it does not occur in the wild and only a few atoms at a time can be made. In this new paper a large group of Swiss, Russian, and Polish authors report:

Experiments conducted at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research) at Dubna in Russia indicate that element 118 (ununoctium, Uuo) was produced. Not too much though, one atom in the spring of 2002 and two more in 2005.

The 2002 experiment involved firing a beam of ⁴⁸₂₀Ca at ²⁴⁹₉₈Cf. The experiment took 4 months and involved a beam of 2.5 x 10¹⁹ calcium ions to produce the single event believed to be the synthesis of ²⁹⁴₁₁₈Uuo.

²⁴⁹₉₈Cf + ⁴⁸₂₀Ca → ²⁹⁴₁₁₈Uuo + 3¹n