The first chemical experiments on copernicium were conducted using the U(Ca,3n) Cn reaction. Detection was by spontaneous fission of the claimed parent isotope with half-life of 5 minutes. Analysis of the data indicated that copernicium was more volatile than mercury and had noble gas properties. However, the confusion regarding the synthesis of copernicium-283 has cast some doubt on these experimental results. Given this uncertainty, between April–May 2006 at the JINR, a FLNR–PSI team conducted experiments probing the synthesis of this isotope as a daughter in the nuclear reaction Pu(Ca,3n) Fl. (The Pu + Ca fusion reaction has a slightly larger cross-section than the U + Ca reaction, so that the best way to produce copernicium for chemical experimentation is as an overshoot product as the daughter of flerovium.) In this experiment, two atoms of copernicium-283 were unambiguously identified and the adsorption properties were interpreted to show that copernicium is a more volatile homologue of mercury, due to formation of a weak metal-metal bond with gold. This agrees with general indications from some relativistic calculations that copernicium is "more or less" homologous to mercury. However, it was pointed out in 2019 that this result may simply be due to strong dispersion interactions.