It doesn’t have to be right to be interesting: that’s my unofficial motto for the physics ArXiv blog, which does write-ups on papers posted to the open preprint site arXiv.org.

Yesterday, the blog had a post about a group claiming to find superheavy element 111 lurking inside a sample of gold. Element 111, aka roentgenium, was discovered in 1994, and it doesn’t stick around for long: anywhere from milliseconds to a few minutes, depending on the isotope.

Amnon Marinov at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel thinks he’s found more stable bits of roentgenium inside a gold sample. Marinov’s strategy was to liquefy the gold and place it under a vacuum for weeks. By his theory, the gold will boil away, leaving behind heavier elements, including roentgenium.

Passing his sample through a mass spectrometer, Marinov finds a bunch of stuff with an atomic mass of 261, about right for roentgenium. After accounting for compounds made up of gold, zinc, uranium and other elements, Marinov is left with a peak which he claims exactly corresponds to the element.

It’s not the first spectacular claim Marinov has made about heavy elements. In 2008, we wrote about a very similar claim of finding element 122 in natural thorium. He believes that these heavy elements’ nuclei are hyper-deformed isomeres, making them more stable than what otherwise would be expected.

Others aren’t buying it. In 2008, Marinov’s theories were greeted with great scepticism by the community, who thought contamination was more likely to create a false positive. Despite almost universal rejection from the mainstream nuclear physics community, Marinov’s website claims that he just got that his work on element 122 published in the International Journal of Modern Physics E (which has an impressive impact factor of 0.643). It hasn’t appeared online yet.

Marinov’s results have been slashdotted without any discernable irony, but most of the readers appear to be appropriately sceptical.