Academic helps reveal secret of 
rarest element

Astatine is of interest to scientists as its decay properties make it an ideal short-range radiation source for targeted alpha therapy in cancer treatment.

The results of the project, which was carried out by Professor Andrei Andreyev, an anniversary professor in the Department of Physics at York University and Dr Valentine Fedosseev, from CERN, the European laboratory for nuclear physics research in Geneva, were revealed yesterday in a research journal.

Through experiments conducted at CERN, scientists have accessed, for the first time, the “ionization potential” of the astatine atom. The successful measurement fills a long-standing gap in the Mendeleev periodic table as astatine was the last element present in nature for which this property was unknown.