| Abstract: | This year marks the 50th anniversary of the preparation of the first transuranium elements, neptunium and plutonium though thus losing pride of place in the Periodic Table, uranium still has secrets to reveal. This article describes efforts to characterize the extremely subtle series of distortions that appears at low temperature in the element. Our understanding of these distortions require some of the latest ideas in diffraction physics, so that the story is a continuously evolving one. Uranium is the only element (so far) that has been found to have a spontaneous charge-density wave. |
