Roentgenium was first produced by Peter Armbruster, Gottfried Münzenber and their team working at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany in late 1994. They bombarded atoms of bismuth-209 with ions of nickel-64 with a device known as a linear accelerator. This produced three atoms of roentgenium-272, an isotope with a half-life of about 1.5 milliseconds (0.0015 seconds), and a free neutron.

Roentgenium's most stable isotope, roentgenium-280, has a half-life of about 3.6 seconds. It decays into meitnerium-276 through alpha decay.

Since only a few atoms of roentgenium have ever been produced, it currently has no uses outside of basic scientific research.