fermium

fermium (Fm), synthetic chemical element of the actinoid series of the periodic table, atomic number 100. Fermium (as the isotope fermium-255) is produced by the intense neutron irradiation of uranium-238 and was first positively identified by American chemist Albert Ghiorso and coworkers at Berkeley, California, in debris taken from the first thermonuclear (hydrogen bomb) test explosion (November 1952), “Mike,” in the South Pacific. The element was named after the Italian-born American physicist Enrico Fermi.

All fermium isotopes are radioactive. Mixtures of the isotopes fermium-254 (3.24-hour half-life), fermium-255 (20.1-hour half-life), fermium-256 (2.6-hour half-life), and fermium-257 (100.5-day half-life) have been produced in a high-neutron-flux reactor by the intense slow-neutron irradiation of elements of lower atomic number, such as plutonium.

The stability of the isotope fermium-257 would make it possible to work with weighable amounts of fermium. However, the only practical production method of fermium, multiple neutron capture in a high-flux reactor, has yielded only picogram (1 picogram = 10⁻¹² gram) amounts of fermium-257, too small to carry out chemistry with pure samples. Therefore, all studies of fermium chemistry have been done on the tracer scale. Fermium exists predominantly in the +3 oxidation state; there is also evidence for the +2 state under highly reducing conditions, paralleling the oxidation-reduction behaviour of the lanthanoid ytterbium. Pure fermium metal has not been prepared, but volatility studies have been carried out with alloys that are dilute solutions of fermium metal in samarium and ytterbium, indicating that fermium appears to be a divalent metal. Fermium-250 (30-minute half-life), the alpha-decay product of nobelium, was used to ascertain the existence of nobelium-254.