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Atomic Disguise Makes Helium Look Like Hydrogen
An anonymous reader writes "In a feat of modern-day alchemy, atom tinkerers have fooled hydrogen atoms into accepting a helium atom as one of their own, reports New Scientist. Donald Fleming of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues managed to disguise a helium atom as a hydrogen atom by replacing one of its orbiting electrons with a muon, which is far heavier than an electron. The camouflaged atom behaves chemically like hydrogen, but has four times the mass of normal hydrogen, allowing predictions for how atomic mass affects reaction rates to be put to the test."
As I recall, the poor muon has an average lifetime of something like 2 microseconds. We might see some interesting theoretical chemistry come out of this (the reaction-rate question) but it looks like we'll end up a little light on practical applications of muons in chemical compounds.
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does it make your voice go higher or lower when inhaled?
I remember that much past interest over muons and hydrogen has been around muon-catalyzed fusion. As you say, the muons are quite short-lived, which prevents them from catalyzing enough H-H fusions to get to breakeven. And then there was the alpha-sticking problem, whereby helium nuclei products then grab the muons, thus stealing them away from the process.
Check out ultra-dense deuterium, though. It's some kind of exotic form of matter, and there have recently been some tantalizing glimpses of it in nano-sized clumps.