Einsteinium - Applications

Applications

There is almost no use for any isotope of einsteinium outside of basic scientific research aiming at production of higher transuranic elements and transactinides.

In 1955, mendelevium was synthesized by irradiating a target consisting of about 109 atoms of 253Es in the 60-inch cyclotron at Berkeley Laboratory. The resulting 253Es(α,n)256Md reaction yielded 17 atoms of the new element with the atomic number of 101.

The rare isotope einsteinium-254 is favored for production of ultraheavy elements because of its large mass, relatively long half-life of 270 days, and availability in significant amounts of several micrograms. Hence einsteinium-254 was used as a target in the attempted synthesis of ununennium (element 119) in 1985 by bombarding it with calcium-48 ions at the superHILAC linear accelerator at Berkeley, California. No atoms were identified, setting an upper limit for the cross section of this reaction at 300 nanobarns.

Einsteinium-254 was used as the calibration marker in the chemical analysis spectrometer ("alpha-scattering surface analyzer") of the Surveyor 5 lunar probe. The large mass of this isotope reduced the spectral overlap between signals from the marker and the studied lighter elements of the lunar surface.