How to create a new element?

How to create a new element?

Well, new elements are made by combining the nuclei of two lighter elements.

With years of research and a cutting-edge understanding of nuclear physics, you'll be able to chose the right parent elements (and the right isotopes).

You'll then need to acquire them. Since the parent nuclei are usually neutron-rich isotopes of heavy elements, this normally requires a nuclear reactor to synthesize them, and some nuclear chemistry to extract them. Probably some isotope separation too, which is a whole headache I won't get into.

Then, you need to make them combine by accelerating one at near-lightspeed and hitting a target made of the other. This only takes a massive linear particle accelerator, like this one or this one. Don't let the images fool you, they're the size of very large buildings. But they're indoors, so you can only fit a small section in a single photo.

Once you've done all that, after months or years of smashing nuclei together using those billion-dollar pieces of equipment and coordinating international research teams to get it to happen in the first place, you may get, if you're lucky, a handful of atoms from your new element.

You won't really be able to observe them directly, there's very few of them, and they normally have very short half-lives. But you'll be able to determine their presence from the particles they emit as they rapidly decay.

(That too may take a while, to fully prove that you've indeed made what you attempted to from this limited data.)

Jokes aside, of the 118 elements, there's only been 24 artificial elements made so far. They are the fruit of over half a century of work by thousands of physicists using massive installations (nuclear reactors and particle accelerators).

Telling your nephew you'd make a new element for him is like telling him you'd plant a flag on the Moon with his name.

It's not a thing you do from your garage.