fermium Chemical Properties

Melting point:

1527°C

form 

metal

color 

metal

Bulk Modulus

15.0 GPa, Estimated

fermium Usage And Synthesis

Chemical Properties

chemical properties similar to those of erbium; man-made radioactive element; discovered in 1952 in debris from thermonuclear explosion by Ghiorso and colleagues; t1/2 of 257Fm is 100 days [KIR78] [HAW93] [MER06]

History

The name of Fermium (Fm） derives from the Italian born physicist “Enrico Fermi”, who built the first man made nuclear reactor. The nuclide . . . Fermium (Fm） was found in the debris from the first thermonuclear weapon’s explosion, nicknamed “Mike,” on November 1, 1952, at Enewetak atoll, Marshall Islands, by a collaboration of American scientists G.R. Choppin, S.G.Thompson, A. Ghiorso and B.G. Harvey from the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico and the University of California lab at Berkeley, CA. The longest half-life associated with this unstable element is 100 day ²⁵⁷Fm.

Definition

ChEBI: Fermium is an actinoid atom and a f-block element atom.