In another room, physicists shoot nitrogen atoms into diamonds, creating the “qubit” building blocks of future quantum computers. Global scientists have the accelerator booked out for months in advance.
And the accelerator plays a crucial role in a more esoteric quest: the hunt for new elements.
How to make a new element
The accelerator room’s a riot of coloured wires, chrome pipes, Ferrari-red particle-boosting magnets and metal chambers where the sped-up ions smash into their target.
Hinde built much of the custom equipment in this room himself.
He’s one of the scientists who have gathered at the brutalist beacon of the accelerator’s building to celebrate a milestone recognition award from the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It’s the third Australian facility to receive the honour, alongside the famous Parkes Dish and the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Tracking Station.
The Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility has loomed above the Australian National University campus in Canberra for half a century.Credit: Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility, ANU
Hinde was part of the international team that confirmed the addition of a new element to the periodic table: element 117, or tennessine. It was made by smashing together calcium-48 and berkelium-249. The intense process produced four atoms of tennessine which fell apart in milliseconds.
Element 118, oganesson, has also been recognised after five atoms were painstakingly produced across multiple experiments.
“But how do you make element 119 and 120? Turns out we, the scientific community, don’t actually know,” Hinde says.
The method of smashing calcium-48 with a heavy element has reached its practical limit because, to create element 119, you’d need einsteinium; an element discovered in the debris of a hydrogen bomb test that’s quick to decay and can only be manufactured in tiny quantities (nanograms, rather than grams).
That’s why Hinde and Cook are investigating other ways of cooking up novel elements.
“We’ve discovered a whole new region of fission and nuclei that behave in an unexpected way,” Hinde says. “That’s something we’ve been able to do with this accelerator, perhaps something we wouldn’t have been able to do anywhere else in the world.”
But why pursue new elements at all, if they flash into existence for less time than it takes to blink?
Hinde was part of the international scientific push to validate element 117, which was added to the periodic table in 2016.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Curiosity and new cancer treatments
Part of the hunt for new elements is motivated by good old-fashioned competition. “A lot of it, to be frank, is nationalism and national pride,” says chief executive of the facility, Dr Tom McGoram. “For China and the United States, it’s that strategic arm-wrestling and posturing. Not so much here. We do it because we’re fascinated by the physics of it.”
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There are no practical uses for the new elements.
“But there’s no more stringent test of our ability to understand complex quantum systems than superheated nuclei,” says McGoram.
“And really, that’s the same story that’s always led us to applications – let’s think of the hardest thing we can think of to do and have a crack at it.”
McGoram nominates lutetium-177 as an example of this; fundamental nuclear physicists examining the nuclei of this rare earth element discovered they could attach it to a molecule that concentrates in the prostate. That’s morphed into a groundbreaking, targeted new treatment for metastatic prostate cancer that significantly boosts survival rates.
Inside part of the heavy ion accelerator facility.Credit: Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility, ANU
They didn’t set out to create a new drug; the physicists just wanted to better understand the underlying science of atoms.
“It’s research like that into the quantum structure of radio nuclei that leads to new therapies for treating cancer,” McGoram says. “It’s pretty cool.”
The key AUKUS warning
This is also one of the few places in the world where science students are tasked with controlling an entire particle accelerator. It’s as practical as an apprenticeship, McGoram says.
Many students, though, are hired by labs in the US or elsewhere overseas. That’s something Australia needs to quickly reverse.
We’ll need nuclear engineers and physicists to safely house and run the AUKUS submarines slated to arrive in the late 2030s; at least 200 nuclear experts and 4300 people trained in nuclear engineering, according to one analysis.
The first AUKUS submarines are expected to be delivered to Australia in the late 2030s.Credit: ADF
But there aren’t enough tenured nuclear physicists to provide the high-level training needed to fully embrace domestic nuclear opportunities in defence, space, medicine and agriculture. There are so few in Australia I’ve just met half of them in the facility’s lobby.
“We’re down to single-digit tenured nuclear scientists in Australia. By the OECD average we should have 40 or 50,” McGoram says. The Australian Academy of Science calls it a nuclear skills crisis.
The lack of senior academic talent is partly a consequence of cuts to nuclear science in the 1980s, the scientists tell me. That serves as a warning of how future prosperity suffers from underfunded science; knock-on effects echo through the decades.
As Rick Spinrad, former head of the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, warned this week about the Trump administration’s massive funding freezes to research: “This is not like tariffs. You can’t just turn a science switch off and then turn it back on again.”
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