On 22 December 1994, physicists at the UNILAC accelerator in Darmstadt, Germany were able to synthesize three atoms of Element 111 with a mass of 272, by bombarding bismuth-209 with atoms of nickel-64.
Atom......number atoms created......date................lifetime 111 3 December, 1994 1.7 milliseconds 110 6 November, 1994 0.17 milliseconds 109 1 August 1982 5.0 milliseconds 108 March 1984 1.8 milliseconds 107 ca 1981 4.7 milliseconds 106 1 ca 1974 0.9 seconds .......................................................................... In the journal 'Nature', 9 February 1995 page 471 a review of these elements is provided. Plans for the synthesis of elements 112, 113 and 114 are now underway, and it expected that an 'island of stability' exists near element 114 where filled-shells occur in nuclear structure involving about 114 protons and 184 neutrons. A review by Peter Armbruster in the 1985 volumn of 'Annual Reviews of Nuclear Physics' page 135, discusses the predictions from the most sophisticated 'liquid drop' nuclear model. Between atomic numbers ( Z) = 15 to 120 there is a fairly stable island similar to the one near Z = 80 where longer half lives are found. An island of stability at Element 114 was predicted back in 1966. Based on what is known from the elements 106 - 111, elements near 114 are expected to decay into these lighter nuclei, but because of the shell-stabilization effect. The decay time may be similar to the shell-stabilized Element 109 of about 5 milliseconds.
Will anything exotic be seen in Element 114, 115 etc? The nuclear models seem to, so-far, be pretty good at predicting nuclear structure in the Element 106 - 111 domain. Nothing exciting is expected until we get to much heavier nuclei when the 'sparking of the vacuum' is expected to occur. This effect is caused by the spontaneous creation of positron-electron pairs out of the physical vacuum as a result of the intense electric fields of more than 150 protons. At the present rate, this effect is a long way off!