Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 408 147 New Elements Extracted Successfully

Two days after receiving the second telegram from Copenhagen, Professor Bierman, carrying his luggage, got off the train at the Stockholm train station.

The Chemistry Branch of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is actually a member organization of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

In Sweden, there are of course members of the federation who can test whether the new substance created by Chen Muwu is element 85 or whether it is a false alarm.

But Professor Bierman, the chairman of the federation, finally chose to come in person.

On the one hand, this is to show that the entire federation attaches great importance to Chen Muwu and the substance he created that is suspected of being a new element.

On the other hand, it was Bierman himself who became very interested in Chen Muwu after listening to Bohr describe to him for a long time what kind of person he was.

Because of this, after receiving a call back from Chen Muwu, he immediately packed his luggage, took the earliest ferry and train, crossed the Oresund Strait to Sweden, and arrived in Stockholm.

Because he didn't know the specific train schedule, Chen Muwu did not go to the train station to pick up Bierman in person or send someone to pick him up.

When Professor Bierman came to Prince's College on the outskirts of Stockholm, everyone was still measuring the spectrum of bismuth vapor.

After more than two days of decay, the content of the iodine-like element No. 85 in the bismuth vapor has become less and less.

It takes a long exposure to accumulate enough photons on the photographic film behind the spectrometer eyepiece to record a very, very weak spectral line.

The intensity of the spectral lines continues to decrease with time, indicating that this is a new substance that decays very quickly.

Everyone is increasingly lucky to have discovered a new substance in the cyclotron.

But no one can jump to this conclusion before the arrival of experts from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

Biermann did not expect to meet five people in Stockholm, each of whom was quite famous.

He thought there was only one Chen Muwu here, plus at most a few students who were doing research under him.

But the actual situation is that in the laboratory of Prince's College, there are not only Chen Muwu, but also last year's two Nobel Prize winners in physics, Zhao Zhongyao and Cockcroft, as well as the daughter of Marie Curie, who won the Nobel Prize twice, and son in law.

Before Bierman arrived in Stockholm, he felt that he was very important as the president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

But after arriving here and meeting everyone, he felt that he was probably the lowest and most insignificant one.

"Hello, Professor Bierman."

"Hello, Dr. Chen Muwu."

Two people's mother tongue, one speaks Danish and the other speaks Chinese.

The wind, horse, and cow are irrelevant, and no one can understand anyone.

So they communicated with each other in French, the lingua franca of the European continent.

Chen Muwu's French proficiency is not as proficient as his English and German proficiency, let alone Chinese, which he has spoken since childhood and for two lifetimes.

However, he is about to become the son-in-law of a French family, and he has been doing research with Irena and Frederic these days. Chen Muwu's French level has improved a lot than before.

Therefore, there was no problem in daily communication between him and Biermann in French.

Even if it involves professional knowledge, there are some contents that Bierman cannot express in French, or the French he speaks cannot be understood by Chen Muwu.

You can also let Irena or Fredrik do the translation in the middle, and chemistry is also a symbolic language. Even if you can't explain it clearly, you can make it clear at a glance as long as you write the reaction equation on paper.

Because Bohr is in charge, the current physics research at the University of Copenhagen is more focused on theoretical physics.

Therefore, even if his junior student Chen Muwu in the Cavendish Laboratory developed an electrostatic particle accelerator, and his teacher Rutherford also promoted this novel experimental tool to the world, Bohr did not ask the Institute of Theoretical Physics to pay for it. To support his junior brothers and teachers.

Because everyone is doing theoretical research, and occasionally do a few extremely simple experiments, there is really no need for such high-end and advanced physics experimental equipment.

Therefore, Bierman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen who came this time, had never seen a particle accelerator.

Seeing the cylindrical object placed in the laboratory, Biermann felt as if Grandma Liu had entered the Grand View Garden.

"Dr. Chen, is this the particle accelerator you developed at the Cavendish Laboratory? The previous second isotope of hydrogen, superheavy hydrogen with a relative atomic mass of three, was discovered by this machine ?"

Bierman was curious whether he had heard of it or not.

He works as a chemist, so he is more interested in the emergence of new elements and new isotopes than using accelerators and physical reactions.

"Professor Bierman, although this one is also called a particle accelerator, it is just the same type of accelerator that appears at Cambridge University and universities and research institutes around the world. It is not the same type of accelerator.

"This is the second generation particle accelerator developed by a few of us in Stockholm. It is more advanced than the first generation, and the principles behind it are completely different."

Chen Muwu has always been equal to a bowl of water. He does not take all the credit to himself, but distributes it equally to the other four people.

Chen Muwu asked Frederick to give Professor Bierman a rough explanation of the principle of accelerating particles in a cyclotron.

After listening to the other party's story, Professor Bierman was amazed.

"Amazing, really amazing! This idea is really great. It not only saves a lot of space, but also saves one accelerating electrode after another.

"Dr. Chen, this must be your own idea.

"Before I left Copenhagen, Professor Bohr had already described many things about you to me. But it was only after I came to Stockholm and saw you in person and this new thing you created that I was able to understand How powerful can one’s creativity be?”

In order to blow Chen Muwu's rainbow fart, Bierman automatically erased the credit of the other four people in his words.

However, the remaining four people, instead of becoming angry, felt that what Professor Bierman said was right. "So you are using this machine to make the alpha particle placed in the center move in a circular motion between the two semicircles, obtaining a particle with very high speed and energy, and then bombarding the target metal bismuth above?

"Dr. Chen, in addition to being able to design a genius cyclotron, this new idea is also very good.

"Chemists like us, in order to search for possible new elements, join forces with explorers and mineralogists, or simply become explorers and mineralogists ourselves, going to the wild, to the mines, to the seaside , or even go to unknown islands in the world that no human has ever visited, to look for ores that they have seen or not seen, and then study whether new elements can be discovered from them.

“The fusion of two atomic nuclei like yours through increased energy collision is a brand new version that we chemists have never experienced.

"No matter whether you discover a new element No. 85 this time, this research method is a new inspiration for the discovery of chemical elements.

"Dr. Chen, how much does your cyclotron cost approximately? If it's not expensive, I'd like to purchase one for the University of Copenhagen."

Liu Xiu, Emperor Guangwu of the Han Dynasty, once said, "What is lost in the east is gained in the mulberry elm." What is supposed to come will always come, and you can't escape even if you run away.

Even the Department of Physics at the University of Copenhagen, controlled by Bohr, considered itself to be engaged in theoretical work and did not purchase the previous electrostatic particle accelerator from the Cavendish Laboratory.

But now, Professor Bierman, on behalf of the Department of Chemistry of the University of Copenhagen, has asked Chen Muwu about the price of this latest cyclotron.

Chen Muwu was not in a hurry and sold the cyclotron right away. What he wanted to do was to produce a few more achievements on the machine, use these achievements to advertise and promote, and then sell the cyclotron at a high price.

So instead of answering Bierman's question, he told him not to worry and to look at the results of the experiment first.

Chen Muwu told the other party that after their observations over the past few days, the experimental product decayed very quickly, so it must be tested immediately after the experiment was completed.

Everyone has been waiting for Professor Bierman's arrival, and this experiment must wait until he arrives before it can be reproduced.

During the past two days, Chen Muwu troubled his soon-to-be brother-in-law Frederick again, asking him to go to Uppsala University again and ask for a new piece of bismuth metal.

He came and went like this so many times that even those who were not curious could not help but wonder what Madame Curie's son-in-law was doing in Sweden.

People at Uppsala University couldn't help but ask Frederick what kind of experiment he wanted to do when he came to borrow bismuth metal many times.

Frederick knew that Chen Muwu had mentioned more than once that he wanted to keep this experiment secret, but the other party had provided them with help so many times, and it would not be appropriate to turn around and leave without answering.

So his brain whirled rapidly for a while, and he came up with a white lie that was reasonable:

"Superconducting."

My soon-to-be brother-in-law Chen Muwu not only studies nuclear physics and quantum mechanics, he has also made great achievements in the research of superconductivity.

The niobium element with the highest superconducting criticality found by scientists so far came from Chen Muwu's discovery in the David Faraday Laboratory.

Niobium is a metal, and bismuth is also a metal.

Niobium can superconduct, but why can’t bismuth superconduct?

The Curies had already polished off the outer oxide layer of the piece of bismuth metal that Frederick had obtained for the second time.

Now that Professor Bierman has finally arrived in Copenhagen, he can conduct experimental demonstrations in front of him, thus once again obtaining a new suspected iodine-like element No. 85.

The cyclotron of Prince College was started again. Countless alpha particles, which had obtained ultra-high energy through circular motion, continuously hit the bismuth metal placed at the target position.

Everyone could not hear the sound like rain hitting the glass bed, nor could they see the sparks and dust like meteorites falling to the earth.

We can only wait quietly for the bombardment to end, and then ask Professor Bierman to come from afar to immediately test the products of the experiment.

It is impossible for all the bismuth metal on the target to be converted into element 85 due to the continuous bombardment.

So the target after bombardment is actually a mixture of bismuth and iodine-like elements.

The first thing Professor Bierman did was to separate the iodine-like elements from this mixture.

Bismuth metal also has some magical chemical properties. For example, its melting point is between 47°C and 271.3°C. It does not even need to be heated. It can melt hard metal by just boiling water.

But the boiling point of bismuth metal is very high, about 1470°C. Compared with its melting point, the difference between the two is more than a thousand degrees Celsius.

Because iodine has the property of sublimation, Professor Bierman believes that iodine-like substances can also sublime.

In the end, he chose the mixture produced by the heating experiment, hoping to separate the iodine-like vapor from the sublimated gas.

This brings about a new problem, that is, while the iodine-like elements sublimate, the bismuth that has become liquid after heating will also begin to slowly evaporate.

So the resulting steam is still a mixture of bismuth and iodine.

If you want to obtain purer iodine, you need to repeat the cycle of evaporation, condensation, evaporation, and condensation again.

The more times you repeat it, the purer the iodine-like product you get.

However, evaporation and condensation takes time, and in previous observations, everyone has concluded that iodine-like elements decay very quickly.

It is very likely that after repeated evaporation and condensation several times, the purity of iodine-like substances has increased theoretically, but after decay, it is possible that the content of iodine-like substances is not as high as it would have been without multiple purifications.

This matter may be big or small.

For Chen Muwu, they have a cyclotron and sufficient bismuth. If they want to obtain higher-purity iodine-like elements, they can conduct experiments one at a time to see which evaporation and condensation times are best for purification. and decay to reach a dynamic equilibrium.

Just doing this seems to be a little too much trouble for Biermann.

Bierman himself is very motivated about this. After all, there are only a few elements that have not yet been discovered on the periodic table. As a chemist, even if he cannot discover a new element personally, but he can witness the discovery of a new element in person, then It is also a very fulfilling thing.

Therefore, in the physics laboratory of Prince College these days, everyone's repeated work is to continuously bombard bismuth metal with accelerated alpha particles, and then continuously purify the bombarded product through distillation and condensation, and finally use low-concentration methanol The solvent finally extracted the highly pure iodine-like element from it.

(End of this chapter)