Technetium
Tecnecio (Tc, Z=43)
- Date
- 1937 · confidence high
- Place
- Palermo, Sicily, Italy
- Credited to
- Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè
- People
- 👤 Carlo Perrier1886–1948👤 Emilio Gino Segrè1905–1989
- Field
- Matter & energy
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
Perrier and Segrè identified it in a molybdenum foil bombarded with deuterons in the Berkeley cyclotron that Lawrence sent to Palermo: the first artificially produced element.
Noddack, Tacke and Berg claimed 'masurium' in 1925, now considered unproven.
What it led to
- Nuclear medicine: Tc-99m used in millions of scans every year
- Confirmation that element 43 has no stable isotopes
- Stellar nucleosynthesis (Tc detected in red giants, 1952)
Built on
- Periodic law and periodic table1869
- Lawrence cyclotron
Made possible
- Tc-99m generator
- Gamma scintigraphy