On the quest of production of superheavy nuclei in reactions of 48Ca with the heaviest cctinide targets

The sequence of radioactive decays of an unknown isotope produced in a rare fusion reaction to known lighter isotopes is used to identify mass and atomic number of the mother isotope, which has been separated before from the bulk of other reaction products by an in-flight recoil separator. By this technique the elements 107 to 112 were produced by single atom decay-chain analysis. Such a correlation technique reaches its limit by the occurrence of accidental sequences and it collapses beyond a maximum possible correlation time, at which a true event cannot be distinguished anymore from a random event. ⁴⁸Ca-induced fusion reactions with actinides are discussed. In 1983 at GSI, Darmstadt and LBL, Berkeley, ⁴⁸Ca/²⁴⁸Cm-experiments (II) were performed, which are compared to recent ⁴⁸Ca-experiments at FLNR-Dubna (I) irradiating ²⁴⁴Pu, ²⁴²Pu, and ²³⁸U. In these experiments production of isotopes of superheavy elements 112 and 114 is claimed. Our analysis of accidental sequences in ⁴⁸Ca-induced reactions is presented, which is at variance with the published analysis from FLNR-Dubna. We find that the maximum correlation time using continuous beams at today existing separation systems is not in the one-hour regime, but in the few-minute regime. The five spontaneous fission events observed in the FLNR experiments are preceded by signals in the (1–16)-minute range. These times are shown to be longer than the maximum possible correlation times. The preceding signals are decoupled from the spontaneous fission signal and carry no information on the spontaneous fission events observed. Moreover, random probabilities of 0.2 to 0.6 for the signals preceding the fission events indicate that the correlations are of random origin. The evidence to have discovered element 114 in the reported experiments is classified “very weak”. Received: 13 October 1999