Fully Relativistic ab initio Dirac-Coulomb Calculations of Atomic Properties of Rn and Element 118

Experiments on the production of elements 112-116 in Dubna, Russia, have proven the existence of the enhanced stability of their neutron-rich isotopes. Furthermore, the existence of element 118 has been demonstrated using the Ca beam and the Cf target [1]. The produced 118 isotope has half-life Tα=0.89 +1.07 -0.31 ms in agreement with the theoretical predictions and decays into 114 or 112, which undergo spontaneous fission,. Chemical identification of element 118 is a matter of the near future. Predictions of its chemical properties, especially those important for gas-phase chromatography experiments [2] are, therefore, needed. Very accurate calculations can nowadays be performed using fully relativistic methods and algorithms. Thus, in this work we predict atomic properties of element 118 and its homolog Rn on the basis of ab initio Dirac-Coulomb (DC) calculations using the DIRAC package [3]. In the DC ab initio method, the many-electron relativistic Dirac-Coulomb Hamiltonian