page_title: Nihonium
section_title: Naming
hierarchical_section_title: Nihonium / History / Naming
caption_attribution_description: Kōsuke Morita, Professor of the Faculty of Science, Kyushu University, and Kōji Morimoto, Leader of the Superheavy Element Device Development Team, Research Group for Superheavy Element, Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, Riken, attended the press conference with Hiroshi Matsumoto, President of the Riken, and Hideto En'yo, Director of Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, Riken, in Fukuoka City, Fukuoka Prefecture on December 1, 2016.
context_page_description: Nihonium is a synthetic chemical element with the symbol Nh and atomic number 113. It is extremely radioactive; its most stable known isotope, nihonium-286, has a half-life of about 10 seconds. In the periodic table, nihonium is a transactinide element in the p-block. It is a member of period 7 and group 13.
  Nihonium was first reported to have been created in 2003 by a Russian–American collaboration at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and in 2004 by a team of Japanese scientists at Riken in Wakō, Japan. The confirmation of their claims in the ensuing years involved independent teams of scientists working in the United States, Germany, Sweden, and China, as well as the original claimants in Russia and Japan. In 2015, the IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party recognised the element and assigned the priority of the discovery and naming rights for the element to Riken, as it judged that they had demonstrated that they had observed element 113 before the JINR team did so. The Riken team suggested the name nihonium in 2016, which was approved in the same year. The name comes from the common Japanese name for Japan.
context_section_description: Using Mendeleev's nomenclature for unnamed and undiscovered elements, nihonium should be known as eka-thallium. In 1979, IUPAC published recommendations according to which the element was to be called ununtrium (with the corresponding symbol of Uut), a systematic element name as a placeholder, until the discovery of the element is confirmed and a name is decided on. The recommendations were widely used in the chemical community on all levels, from chemistry classrooms to advanced textbooks, but were mostly ignored among scientists in the field, who called it "element 113", with the symbol of E113, (113), or even simply 113.
  Before the JWP recognition of their priority, the Japanese team had unofficially suggested various names: japonium, after their home country; nishinanium, after Japanese physicist Yoshio Nishina, the "founding father of modern physics research in Japan"; and rikenium, after the institute. After the recognition, the Riken team gathered in February 2016 to decide on a name. Morita expressed his desire for the name to honour the fact that element 113 had been discovered in Japan. Japonium was considered, making the connection to Japan easy to identify for non-Japanese, but it was rejected as Jap is considered an ethnic slur. The name nihonium was chosen after an hour of deliberation: it comes from nihon (日本), one of the two Japanese pronunciations for the name of Japan. The discoverers also intended to reference the support of their research by the Japanese people (Riken being almost entirely government-funded), recover lost pride and trust in science among those who were affected by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and honour Japanese chemist Masataka Ogawa's 1908 discovery of rhenium, which he named "nipponium" with symbol Np after the other Japanese pronunciation of Japan's name. As Ogawa's claim had not been accepted, the name "nipponium" could not be reused for a new element, and its symbol Np had since been used for neptunium. In March 2016, Morita proposed the name "nihonium" to IUPAC, with the symbol Nh. The naming realised what had been a national dream in Japanese science ever since Ogawa's claim.
  The former president of IUPAP, Cecilia Jarlskog, complained at the Nobel Symposium on Superheavy Elements in Bäckaskog Castle, Sweden, in June 2016 about the lack of openness involved in the process of approving new elements, and stated that she believed that the JWP's work was flawed and should be redone by a new JWP. A survey of physicists determined that many felt that the Lund–GSI 2016 criticisms of the JWP report were well-founded, but that the conclusions would hold up if the work was redone, and the new president, Bruce McKellar, ruled that the proposed names should be released in a joint IUPAP–IUPAC press release. Thus, IUPAC and IUPAP publicised the proposal of nihonium that June, and set a five-month term to collect comments, after which the name would be formally established at a conference. The name was officially approved in November 2016. The naming ceremony for the new element was held in Tokyo, Japan, in March 2017, with Naruhito, then the Crown Prince of Japan, in attendance.
caption: Kōsuke Morita and Hiroshi Matsumoto, celebrating the naming on 1 December 2016.
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