A new titanium route just opened the path to the heaviest element ever made.
The confirmed periodic table ends at oganesson, element 118 — the last row, filled out only in the 2000s and 2010s by slamming calcium‑48 beams into heavy actinide targets. That method hit a wall: element 118 needed californium, and there is no heavier target element available in usable quantity to reach 119 and 120 the same way.
In 2024, a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory proved a different approach. Instead of calcium‑48, they fired a beam of titanium‑50 at a plutonium‑244 target and successfully produced livermorium (element 116) — the first time a superheavy element was made with a titanium beam. It's a proof of concept for the technique that would be needed to reach element 120.
The catch: lead author Jacklyn Gates estimates element 120 will be roughly 10–20 times harder to make than element 116. Superheavy atoms exist for a heartbeat before decaying, so detecting even a single one is a needle‑in‑a‑haystack hunt inside a cyclotron. The formal search is ramping up across 2025–2026.