From The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Via
The DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory
5.22.24
Lawrence Bernard
Leo Williams
Contact
Peter Genzer
genzer@bnl.gov
(631) 344-3174
For more information on Brookhaven’s role in this research, contact Denise Yazak.
dyazak@bnl.gov
631-344-6371)
This groundbreaking promethium research was led by, from left, Alex Ivanov, Santa Jansone-Popova and Ilja Popovs, all of ORNL. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Scientists have uncovered the properties of a rare earth element that was first discovered 80 years ago at the very same laboratory, opening a new pathway for the exploration of elements critical in modern technology, from medicine to space travel.
Promethium was discovered in 1945 at Clinton Laboratories, now the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and continues to be produced at ORNL in minute quantities. Some of its properties have remained elusive despite the rare earth element’s use in medical studies and long-lived nuclear batteries. It is named after the mythological Titan who delivered fire to humans and whose name symbolizes human striving.
“The whole idea was to explore this very rare element to gain new knowledge,” said Alex Ivanov, an ORNL scientist who co-led the research. “Once we realized it was discovered at this national lab and the place where we work, we felt an obligation to conduct this research to uphold the ORNL legacy.”
Conceptual art shows the rare earth element promethium in a vial surrounded by an organic ligand. ORNL scientists have discovered hidden features of promethium, opening a pathway for research into other lanthanide elements. Credit: Jacquelyn DeMink, art; Thomas Dyke, photography/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
The ORNL-led team of scientists prepared a chemical complex of promethium, which enabled its characterization in solution for the first time. Thus, they exposed the secrets of this extremely rare lanthanide, whose atomic number is 61, in a series of meticulous experiments.
Their landmark study, published in the journal Nature, marks a significant advance in rare earth research and might rewrite chemistry textbooks.
Fig. 1: Preparation of PmIII and its chelation by the multidentate ligand PyDGA in an aqueous solution.
a, Photograph of purified PmIII compound prepared in this study. The depicted pink-coloured 147Pm(NO3)3·nH2O (n < 9) solid residue was obtained after several purification steps and used in a PmIII complexation. b, Each PyDGA ligand molecule consists of two amide carbonyl oxygen groups and one ether oxygen atom, enabling high aqueous solubility. This chelator coordinates with the promethium cation in a tridentate fashion to form the 1:3 complex by providing nine metal-binding O donor atoms in the first coordination sphere of PmIII.
See the science paper for further instructive material with images.
“Because it has no stable isotopes, promethium was the last lanthanide to be discovered and has been the most difficult to study,” said ORNL’s Ilja Popovs, who co-led the research. Most rare earth elements are lanthanides, elements from 57 — lanthanum — to 71 — lutetium — on the periodic table. They have similar chemical properties but differ in size.
The other 14 lanthanides are well understood. They are metals with useful properties that make them indispensable in many modern technologies. They are workhorses of applications such as lasers, permanent magnets in wind turbines and electric vehicles, X-ray screens and even cancer-fighting medicines.
“There are thousands of publications on lanthanides’ chemistry without promethium. That was a glaring gap for all of science,” said ORNL’s Santa Jansone-Popova, who co-led the study. “Scientists have to assume most of its properties. Now we can actually measure some of them.”
Team members at ORNL’s Radiochemical Engineering Development Center, where the promethium sample was purified, included, from left, Richard Mayes, Frankie White, April Miller, Matt Silveira and Thomas Dyke. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
The research relied on unique resources and expertise available at DOE national laboratories. Using a research reactor, hot cells and supercomputers, as well as the accumulated knowledge and skills of 18 scientists in different fields, the authors detailed the first observation of a promethium complex in solution.
The ORNL scientists bound, or chelated, radioactive promethium with special organic molecules called diglycolamide ligands. Then, using X-ray spectroscopy, they determined the properties of the complex, including the length of the promethium chemical bond with neighboring atoms — a first for science and a longstanding missing piece to the periodic table of elements.
Promethium is very rare; only about a pound occurs naturally in the Earth’s crust at any given time. Unlike other rare earth elements, only minute quantities of synthetic promethium are available because it has no stable isotopes.
For this study, the ORNL team produced the isotope promethium-147, with a half-life of 2.62 years, in sufficient quantities and at a high enough purity to study its chemical properties. ORNL is the United States’ only producer of promethium-147.
Notably, the team provided the first demonstration of a feature of lanthanide contraction in solution for the whole lanthanide series, including promethium, atomic number 61. Lanthanide contraction is a phenomenon in which elements with atomic numbers between 57 and 71 are smaller than expected. As the atomic numbers of these lanthanides increase, the radii of their ions decrease. This contraction creates distinctive chemical and electronic properties because the same charge is limited to a shrinking space. The ORNL scientists got a clear promethium signal, which enabled them to better define the shape of the trend — across the series.
“It’s really astonishing from a scientific viewpoint. I was struck once we had all the data,” said Ivanov. “The contraction of this chemical bond accelerates along this atomic series, but after promethium, it considerably slows down. This is an important landmark in understanding the chemical bonding properties of these elements and their structural changes along the periodic table.”
Many of these elements, such as those in the lanthanide and actinide series, have applications ranging from cancer diagnostics and treatment to renewable energy technologies and long-lived nuclear batteries for deep space exploration.
The achievement will, among other things, ease the difficult job of separating these valuable elements, according to Jansone-Popova. The team has long worked on separations for the whole series of lanthanides, “but promethium was the last puzzle piece. It was quite challenging,” she said. “You cannot utilize all these lanthanides as a mixture in modern advanced technologies, because first you need to separate them. This is where the contraction becomes very important; it basically allows us to separate them, which is still quite a difficult task.”
The research team used several premier DOE facilities in the project. At ORNL, promethium was synthesized at the High Flux Isotope Reactor [below], a DOE Office of Science user facility, and purified at the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center, a multipurpose radiochemical processing and research facility. Then, the team performed X-ray absorption spectroscopy at the National Synchrotron Light Source II [below], a DOE Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, specifically working at the Beamline for Materials Measurement, which is funded and operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The promethium research team, standing in front of ORNL’s Radiochemical Engineering Development Center, included, from left, Santanu Roy, Thomas Dyke, Ilja Popovs, Richard Mayes, Darren Driscoll, Frankie White, Alex Ivanov, April Miller, Subhamay Pramanik, Santa Jansone-Popova, Sandra Davern, Matt Silveira, Shelley VanCleve and Jeffrey Einkauf. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
The team also performed quantum chemical calculations and molecular dynamics simulations at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL, using the lab’s Summit supercomputer [below], the only computational resource capable of providing the necessary calculations at the time. In addition, the researchers used resources of the Compute and Data Environment for Science at ORNL. They expect future calculations to be performed on ORNL’s Frontier [below], the world’s most powerful supercomputer and the first exascale system, which is able to perform more than a quintillion calculations each second.
Popovs emphasized that the ORNL-led accomplishments can be attributed to teamwork. Each of the Nature paper’s 18 authors was critical to the project, he said.
The achievement sets the stage for a new era of research, the scientists said. “Anything that we would call a modern marvel of technology would include, in one shape or another, these rare earth elements,” Popovs said. “We are adding the missing link.”
Besides Popovs, Ivanov and Jansone-Popova from ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division, the paper’s co-authors include Darren Driscoll, Subhamay Pramanik, Jeffrey Einkauf, Santanu Roy and Thomas Dyke, also of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division; Frankie White, Richard Mayes, Laetitia Delmau, Samantha Cary, April Miller and Sandra Davern of ORNL’s Radioisotope Science and Technology Division; Matt Silveira and Shelley VanCleve of ORNL’s Isotope Processing and Manufacturing Division; Dmytro Bykov of the National Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL; and Bruce Ravel of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
This work was primarily co-sponsored by DOE’s Office of Science for ligand synthesis, lanthanide complexation studies, crystallization processes, spectroscopic analyses and simulation efforts. The production, purification and preparation of the promethium sample were supported by the DOE Isotope Program, managed by the Office of Science for Isotope R&D and Production. The single-crystal X-ray diffraction data collection and refinement were supported by the DOE Office of Science.
See the full article here .
Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.
five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.
One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the The DOE Office of Science, The DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. The Laboratory’s almost 3,000 scientists, engineers, and support staff are joined each year by more than 5,000 visiting researchers from around the world. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.
Research at BNL specializes in nuclear and high energy physics, energy science and technology, environmental and bioscience, nanoscience and national security. The 5300 acre campus contains several large research facilities, including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [below] and National Synchrotron Light Source II [below]. A number of Nobel prizes have been awarded for work conducted at Brookhaven lab.
BNL is staffed by approximately 2,750 scientists, engineers, technicians, and support personnel, and hosts 4,000 guest investigators every year. The laboratory has its own police station, fire department, and ZIP code (11973). In total, the lab spans a 5,265-acre (21 km^2) area that is mostly coterminous with the hamlet of Upton, New York. BNL is served by a rail spur operated as-needed by the New York and Atlantic Railway. Co-located with the laboratory is the Upton, New York, forecast office of the National Weather Service.
Major programs
Although originally conceived as a nuclear research facility, Brookhaven Lab’s mission has greatly expanded. Its foci are now:
Nuclear and high-energy physics
Physics and chemistry of materials
Environmental and climate research
Nanomaterials
Energy research
Nonproliferation
Structural biology
Accelerator physics
Operation
Brookhaven National Lab was originally owned by the Atomic Energy Commission and is now owned by that agency’s successor, the United States Department of Energy (DOE). DOE subcontracts the research and operation to universities and research organizations. It is currently operated by Brookhaven Science Associates LLC, which is an equal partnership of Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute. From 1947 to 1998, it was operated by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), but AUI lost its contract in the wake of two incidents: a 1994 fire at the facility’s high-beam flux reactor that exposed several workers to radiation and reports in 1997 of a tritium leak into the groundwater of the Long Island Central Pine Barrens on which the facility sits.
Foundations
Following World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission was created to support government-sponsored peacetime research on atomic energy. The effort to build a nuclear reactor in the American northeast was fostered largely by physicists Isidor Isaac Rabi and Norman Foster Ramsey Jr., who during the war witnessed many of their colleagues at Columbia University leave for new remote research sites following the departure of the Manhattan Project from its campus. Their effort to house this reactor near New York City was rivalled by a similar effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to have a facility near Boston, Massachusetts. Involvement was quickly solicited from representatives of northeastern universities to the south and west of New York City such that this city would be at their geographic center. In March 1946 a nonprofit corporation was established that consisted of representatives from nine major research universities — Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, and Yale University.
Out of 17 considered sites in the Boston-Washington corridor, Camp Upton on Long Island was eventually chosen as the most suitable in consideration of space, transportation, and availability. The camp had been a training center from the US Army during both World War I and World War II. After the latter war, Camp Upton was deemed no longer necessary and became available for reuse. A plan was conceived to convert the military camp into a research facility.
On March 21, 1947, the Camp Upton site was officially transferred from the U.S. War Department to the new U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), predecessor to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Research and facilities
Reactor history
In 1947 construction began on the first nuclear reactor at Brookhaven, the Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor. This reactor, which opened in 1950, was the first reactor to be constructed in the United States after World War II. The High Flux Beam Reactor operated from 1965 to 1999. In 1959 Brookhaven built the first US reactor specifically tailored to medical research, the Brookhaven Medical Research Reactor, which operated until 2000.
Accelerator history
In 1952 Brookhaven began using its first particle accelerator, the Cosmotron. At the time the Cosmotron was the world’s highest energy accelerator, being the first to impart more than 1 GeV of energy to a particle.
The Cosmotron was retired in 1966, after it was superseded in 1960 by the new Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS).
BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS).
The AGS was used in research that resulted in 3 Nobel prizes, including the discovery of the muon neutrino, the charm quark, and CP violation.
In 1970 in BNL started the ISABELLE project to develop and build two proton intersecting storage rings.
The groundbreaking for the project was in October 1978. In 1981, with the tunnel for the accelerator already excavated, problems with the superconducting magnets needed for the ISABELLE accelerator brought the project to a halt, and the project was eventually cancelled in 1983.
After ISABELLE’S cancellation, physicist at BNL proposed that the excavated tunnel and parts of the magnet assembly be used in another accelerator. In 1984 the first proposal for the accelerator now known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)[below] was put forward. The construction got funded in 1991 and RHIC has been operational since 2000. One of the world’s only two operating heavy-ion colliders, RHIC is as of 2010 the second-highest-energy collider after the Large Hadron Collider (CH). RHIC is housed in a tunnel 2.4 miles (3.9 km) long and is visible from space.
On January 9, 2020, it was announced by Paul Dabbar, undersecretary of the US Department of Energy Office of Science, that the BNL eRHIC design has been selected over the conceptual design put forward by DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility [Jlab] as the future Electron–ion collider (EIC)
In addition to the site selection, it was announced that the BNL EIC had acquired CD-0 from the Department of Energy. BNL’s eRHIC design proposes upgrading the existing Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which collides beams light to heavy ions including polarized protons, with a polarized electron facility, to be housed in the same tunnel.
Other discoveries
In 1958, Brookhaven scientists created one of the world’s first video games, Tennis for Two. In 1968 Brookhaven scientists patented Maglev, a transportation technology that utilizes magnetic levitation.
Major facilities
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which was designed to research quark–gluon plasma and the sources of proton spin. Until 2009 it was the world’s most powerful heavy ion collider. It is the only collider of spin-polarized protons.
Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), used for the study of nanoscale materials.
BNL National Synchrotron Light Source II, Brookhaven’s newest user facility, opened in 2015 to replace the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), which had operated for 30 years. NSLS was involved in the work that won the 2003 and 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, a particle accelerator that was used in three of the lab’s Nobel prizes.
Accelerator Test Facility, generates, accelerates and monitors particle beams.
Tandem Van de Graaff, once the world’s largest electrostatic accelerator.
Computational Science resources, including access to a massively parallel Blue Gene series supercomputer that is among the fastest in the world for scientific research, run jointly by Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University-SUNY.
Interdisciplinary Science Building, with unique laboratories for studying high-temperature superconductors and other materials important for addressing energy challenges.
NASA Space Radiation Laboratory, where scientists use beams of ions to simulate cosmic rays and assess the risks of space radiation to human space travelers and equipment.
Off-site contributions
It is a contributing partner to the ATLAS experiment, one of the four detectors located at the The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organization européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organization für Kernforschung](CH)[CERN] Large Hadron Collider(LHC). Credit: CERN.
It is currently operating at The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organization européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organization für Kernforschung](CH) [CERN] near Geneva, Switzerland.
Brookhaven was also responsible for the design of Spallation Neutron Source at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee.
Brookhaven plays a role in a range of neutrino research projects around the world, including the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment (CN) nuclear power plant, approximately 52 kilometers northeast of Hong Kong and 45 kilometers east of Shenzhen, China.
Established in 1942, The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system (by size) and third largest by annual budget. It is located in the Roane County section of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Its scientific programs focus on materials, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology and national security, sometimes in partnership with the state of Tennessee, universities and other industries.
ORNL has several of the world’s top supercomputers, including Summit, ranked by the TOP500 as Earth’s ninth-most powerful.
The lab is a leading neutron and nuclear power research facility that includes the Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotope Reactor.
It hosts the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, the BioEnergy Science Center, and the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Nuclear Reactors.
ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Areas of research
ORNL conducts research and development activities that span a wide range of scientific disciplines. Many research areas have a significant overlap with each other; researchers often work in two or more of the fields listed here. The laboratory’s major research areas are described briefly below.
Chemical sciences – ORNL conducts both fundamental and applied research in a number of areas, including catalysis, surface science and interfacial chemistry; molecular transformations and fuel chemistry; heavy element chemistry and radioactive materials characterization; aqueous solution chemistry and geochemistry; mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy; separations chemistry; materials chemistry including synthesis and characterization of polymers and other soft materials; chemical biosciences; and neutron science.
Electron microscopy – ORNL’s electron microscopy program investigates key issues in condensed matter, materials, chemical and nanosciences.
Nuclear medicine – The laboratory’s nuclear medicine research is focused on the development of improved reactor production and processing methods to provide medical radioisotopes, the development of new radionuclide generator systems, the design and evaluation of new radiopharmaceuticals for applications in nuclear medicine and oncology.
Physics – Physics research at ORNL is focused primarily on studies of the fundamental properties of matter at the atomic, nuclear, and subnuclear levels and the development of experimental devices in support of these studies.
Population – ORNL provides federal, state and international organizations with a gridded population database, called Landscan, for estimating ambient population. LandScan is a raster image, or grid, of population counts, which provides human population estimates every 30 x 30 arc seconds, which translates roughly to population estimates for 1 kilometer square windows or grid cells at the equator, with cell width decreasing at higher latitudes. Though many population datasets exist, LandScan is the best spatial population dataset, which also covers the globe. Updated annually (although data releases are generally one year behind the current year) offers continuous, updated values of population, based on the most recent information. Landscan data are accessible through GIS applications and a USAID public domain application called Population Explorer.