page_title: Isotopes of darmstadtium
section_title: Nuclear isomerism
hierarchical_section_title: Isotopes of darmstadtium / Isotopes and nuclear properties / Nucleosynthesis / Nuclear isomerism
caption_attribution_description: English: decay scheme for 270Ds
context_page_description: Darmstadtium is a synthetic element, and thus a standard atomic weight cannot be given. Like all synthetic elements, it has no stable isotopes. The first isotope to be synthesized was ²⁶⁹Ds in 1994. There are 9 known radioisotopes from ²⁶⁷Ds to ²⁸¹Ds and 2 or 3 known isomers. The longest-lived isotope is ²⁸¹Ds with a half-life of 9.6 seconds.
context_section_description: ²⁸¹Ds
  The production of ²⁸¹Ds by the decay of ²⁸⁹Fl or ²⁹³Lv has produced two very different decay modes. The most common and readily confirmed mode is spontaneous fission with a half-life of 11 s. A much rarer and as yet unconfirmed mode is alpha decay by emission of an alpha particle with energy 8.77 MeV with an observed half-life of around 3.7 min. This decay is associated with a unique decay pathway from the parent nuclides and must be assigned to an isomeric level. The half-life suggests that it must be assigned to an isomeric state but further research is required to confirm these reports. It was suggested in 2016 that this unknown activity might be due to ²⁸²Mt, the great-granddaughter of ²⁹⁰Fl via electron capture and two consecutive alpha decays.
  ²⁷¹Ds
  Decay data from the direct synthesis of ²⁷¹Ds clearly indicates the presence of two nuclear isomers. The first emits alpha particles with energies 10.74 and 10.69 MeV and has a half-life of 1.63 ms. The other only emits alpha particles with an energy of 10.71 MeV and has a half-life of 69 ms. The first has been assigned to the ground state and the latter to an isomeric level. It has been suggested that the closeness of the alpha decay energies indicates that the isomeric level may decay primarily by delayed isomeric transition to the ground state, resulting in an identical measured alpha energy and a combined half-life for the two processes.
  ²⁷⁰Ds
  The direct production of ²⁷⁰Ds has clearly identified two nuclear isomers. The ground state decays by alpha emission into the ground state of ²⁶⁶Hs by emitting an alpha particle with energy 11.03 MeV and has a half-life of 0.10 ms. The metastable state decays by alpha emission, emitting alpha particles with energies of 12.15, 11.15, and 10.95 MeV, and has a half-life of 6 ms. When the metastable state emits an alpha particle of energy 12.15 MeV, it decays into the ground state of ²⁶⁶Hs, indicating that it has 1.12 MeV of excess energy.
caption: The current partial decay level scheme for 270Ds proposed following the work of Hofmann et al. in 2000 at GSI[13]
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