Archaeological discoveries

How was roentgenium discovered?

Roentgenium was discovered in 1994 at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, by a team led by Sigurd Hofmann. The team bombarded a target of lead-208 with a beam of nickel-64 nuclei. This reaction produced an extremely neutron-rich isotope of roentgenium, roentgenium-261, which was detected through the observation of its alpha decay. The discovery of roentgenium was confirmed in 2004 by a team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia.