Recent great impact by an Isotope Separator On-Line (ISOL) in nuclear and radiochemistry.

On April 9 2015, the Letter article titled "Measurement of the first ionization potential of lawrencium, element 103" is now published at News and Views on Nature (2015) which has been performed by our remarkably Japanese colleagues of nuclear and radiochemistry at JAEA (Japan Atomic Energy Agency). In this review, the author will state that the isotope separator on-line (ISOL) our regularly used, one of mass separation techniques, with a thermal surface ionization makes possible for determining the ionization potential of lawrencium based on the fruitful fundations of developing the ISOL system until now and also ever studying searches for unknown nuclei and these nuclear decay properties around actinide region in the past 20 years.

Relativistic correlating basis sets for actinide atoms from 90Th to 103Lr.

For 14 actinide atoms from (90)Th to (103)Lr, contracted Gaussian-type function sets are developed for the description of correlations of the 5f, 6d, and 7s electrons. Basis sets for the 6d orbitals are also prepared, since the orbitals are important in molecular environments despite their vacancy in the ground state of some actinides. A segmented contraction scheme is employed for the compactness and efficiency. Contraction coefficients and exponents are so determined as to minimize the deviation from accurate natural orbitals of the lowest term arising from the 5f(n-1)6d(1)7s(2) configuration. The spin-free relativistic effects are considered through the third-order Douglas-Kroll approximation. To test the present correlating sets, all-electron calculations are performed on the ground state of (90)ThO molecule. The calculated spectroscopic constants are in excellent agreement with experimental values.