Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 6, 2009

A New Graphical Representation of the

Periodic Table
But is the latest redrawing of Mendeleevs masterpiece an
improvement?

The periodic table has been stamped into the minds of countless generations of schoolchildren.
Immediately recognised and universally adopted, it has long since achieved iconic status.
So why change it? According to Mohd Abubakr from Microsoft Research in Hyderabad, the table can be
improved by arranging it in circular form. He says this gives a sense of the relative size of atomsthe
closer to the centre, the smaller they aresomething that is missing from the current form of the table. It
preserves the periods and groups that make Mendeleevs table so useful. And by placing hydrogen and
helium near the centre, Abubakr says this solves the problem of whether to put hydrogen with the
halogens or alkali metals and of whether to put helium in the 2nd group or with the inert gases.
Thats worthy but flawed. Unfortunately, Abubakrs arrangement means that the table can only be read
by rotating it. Thats tricky with a textbook and impossible with most computer screens.
The great utility of Mendeleevs arrangements was its predictive power: the gaps in his table allowed him
to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. Its worth preserving in its current form for that

reason alone.
However, theres another relatively new way of arranging the elements developed by Maurice Kibler at
Institut de Physique Nucleaire de Lyon in France that may have new predictive power.
Kibler says the symmetries of the periodic table can be captured by a group theory, specifically the
composition of the special orthogonal group in 4 + 2 dimensions with the special unitary group of
degree 2 (ie SO (4,2) x SU(2)).
That gives a layout as follows:

Kiblers approach is akin to the way particle physicists classify particles by their symmetry properties
such as flavor and color. That has been hugely useful in predicting the existence of new particles. Can
the power of this group theoretical approach have the same impact on chemistry?
The problem for Kibler (and anybody else attempting to redraw the table of elements) is that we seem to
have already found all the stable elements and predicted the existence of other superheavy ones. The
question is whether Kiblers approach has any predictive power beyond that. Maybe but the jury (and
Kibler himself) is still out on this one.
Refs:
arxiv.org/abs/0910.0273: An Alternate Graphical Representation of Periodic table of Chemical Elements
arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0408104: On a Group-Theoretical Approach to the Periodic Table of Chemical
Elements

Tagged: Materials
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