mendelevium
Noun
Meaning
a radioactive transuranic element synthesized by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles (Md is the current symbol for mendelevium but Mv was formerly the symbol)
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After 258 Md, the next most stable mendelevium isotopes are 260 Md with a half-life of 31.8 days, 257 Md with a half-life of 5.52 hours, 259 Md with a half-life of 1.60 hours, and 256 Md with a half-life of 1.27 hours.
Among the 15 known isotopes of mendelevium (mass numbers from 245 to 260), the most studied is 256 Md, which mainly decays through the electron capture (α-radiation is ≈10%) with the half-life of 77 minutes.
All of the remaining mendelevium isotopes have half-lives that are less than an hour, and the majority of these have half-lives that are less than 5 minutes.
A total of sixteen mendelevium isotopes are known, the most stable being 258 Md with a half-life of 51 days; nevertheless, the shorter-lived 256 Md (half-life 1.27 hours ) is most commonly used in chemistry because it can be produced on a larger scale.
In 1955, mendelevium was synthesized by irradiating a target consisting of about 10 9 atoms of 253 Es in the 60-inch cyclotron at Berkeley Laboratory.
In particular, einsteinium was used to synthesize, for the first time, 17 atoms of the new element mendelevium in 1955.