Period 7 element

Elements

(?) Prediction

(*) Exception to the Madelung rule.

In many periodic tables, the f-block is erroneously shifted one element to the right, so that lanthanum and actinium become d-block elements, and Ce–Lu and Th–Lr form the f-block tearing the d-block into two very uneven portions. This is a holdover from early erroneous measurements of electron configurations. Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz pointed out in 1948 that lutetium is not an f-block element, and since then physical, chemical, and electronic evidence has overwhelmingly supported that the f-block contains the elements La–Yb and Ac–No, as shown here and as supported by International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry reports dating from 1988 and 2021.

S-block

Francium and radium make up the s-block elements of the 7th period.

Francium (Fr, atomic number 87) is a highly radioactive metal that decays into astatine, radium, or radon. It is one of the two least electronegative elements; the other is caesium. As an alkali metal, it has one valence electron. Francium was discovered by Marguerite Perey in France (from which the element takes its name) in 1939. It was the last element discovered in nature, rather than by synthesis. Outside the laboratory, francium is extremely rare, with trace amounts found in uranium and thorium ores, where the isotope francium-223 continually forms and decays. As little as 20–30 g (one ounce) exists at any given time throughout Earth's crust; the other isotopes are entirely synthetic. The largest amount produced in the laboratory was a cluster of more than 300,000 atoms.

Radium (Ra, atomic number 88) is an almost pure-white alkaline earth metal, but it readily oxidizes, reacting with nitrogen (rather than oxygen) on exposure to air, becoming black in color. All isotopes of radium are radioactive; the most stable is radium-226, which has a half-life of 1601 years and decays into radon. Due to such instability, radium luminesces, glowing a faint blue. Radium, in the form of radium chloride, was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. They extracted the radium compound from uraninite and published the discovery at the French Academy of Sciences five days later. Radium was isolated in its metallic state by Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne through electrolysis of radium chloride in 1910. Since its discovery, it has given names such as radium A and radium C₂ to several isotopes of other elements that are decay products of radium-226. In nature, radium is found in uranium ores in trace amounts as small as a seventh of a gram per ton of uraninite. Radium is not necessary for living things, and adverse health effects are likely when it is incorporated into biochemical processes due to its radioactivity and chemical reactivity.

Actinides

The actinide or actinoid (IUPAC nomenclature) series encompasses the 15 metallic chemical elements with atomic numbers from 89 to 103, actinium through lawrencium.

The actinide series is named after its first element actinium. All but one of the actinides are f-block elements, corresponding to the filling of the 5f electron shell; lawrencium, a d-block element, is also generally considered an actinide. In comparison with the lanthanides, also mostly f-block elements, the actinides show much more variable valence.

Of the actinides, thorium and uranium occur naturally in substantial, primordial, quantities. Radioactive decay of uranium produces transient amounts of actinium, protactinium and plutonium, and atoms of neptunium and plutonium are occasionally produced from transmutation in uranium ores. The other actinides are purely synthetic elements, though the first six actinides after plutonium would have been produced at Oklo (and long since decayed away), and curium almost certainly previously existed in nature as an extinct radionuclide. Nuclear tests have released at least six actinides heavier than plutonium into the environment; analysis of debris from a 1952 hydrogen bomb explosion showed the presence of americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium and fermium.

All actinides are radioactive and release energy upon radioactive decay; naturally occurring uranium and thorium, and synthetically produced plutonium are the most abundant actinides on Earth. These are used in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Uranium and thorium also have diverse current or historical uses, and americium is used in the ionization chambers of most modern smoke detectors.

In presentations of the periodic table, the lanthanides and the actinides are customarily shown as two additional rows below the main body of the table, with placeholders or else a selected single element of each series (either lanthanum or lutetium, and either actinium or lawrencium, respectively) shown in a single cell of the main table, between barium and hafnium, and radium and rutherfordium, respectively. This convention is entirely a matter of aesthetics and formatting practicality; a rarely used wide-formatted periodic table (32 columns) shows the lanthanide and actinide series in their proper columns, as parts of the table's sixth and seventh rows (periods).

Transactinides

Transactinide elements (also, transactinides, or super-heavy elements, or superheavies) are the chemical elements with atomic numbers greater than those of the actinides, the heaviest of which is lawrencium (103). All transactinides of period 7 have been discovered, up to oganesson (element 118).

Superheavies are also transuranic elements, that is, have atomic number greater than that of uranium (92). The further distinction of having an atomic number greater than the actinides is significant in several ways:

• The transactinide elements all have electrons in the 6d subshell in their ground state (and thus are placed in the d-block).
• Even the longest-lived known isotopes of many transactinides have extremely short half-lives, measured in seconds or smaller units.
• The element naming controversy involved the first five or six transactinides. These elements thus used three-letter systematic names for many years after their discovery was confirmed. (Usually, the three-letter symbols are replaced with two-letter symbols relatively soon after a discovery has been confirmed.)

Transactinides are radioactive and have only been obtained synthetically in laboratories. None of these elements has ever been collected in a macroscopic sample. Transactinides are all named after scientists, or important locations involved in the synthesis of the elements.

Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Glenn T. Seaborg, who first proposed the actinide concept which led to the acceptance of the actinide series, also proposed the existence of a transactinide series ranging from element 104 to 121 and a superactinide series approximately spanning elements 122 to 153. The transactinide seaborgium is named in his honor.

IUPAC defines an element to exist if its lifetime is longer than 10⁻¹⁴ second, the time needed to form an electron cloud.