Slashdot Mirror
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.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
This is super cool, but less for the kinetic isotope effect (KIE) studies and more for the muon-electron substitution. We've compared isotope masses with reaction rates using deuterium and tritium before, so using "H-4" and "H-5" is nice for extended validation, but not unexpected. The muonium is pretty bad-ass, though.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
I have bad news for you. If you disguise your THC so that it acts like a different chemical compound, it probably won't actually make you high anymore.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You may be able to, but why would you want to. Helium is a lot more expensive than hydrogen to begin with, and this "mutated" helium is probably an order of magnitude more expensive still. Of course, hydrogen bombs work by fusing hydrogen into helium, so your bomb would have to fuse helium into lithium or beryllium. That's probably a harder reaction to establish and may not yield as much. (Although it should be noted that fusion bombs typically bombard lithium with neutrons and fission it into tritium, which then fuses into helium.)
So... more expensive and not as powerful. Regular bombs would give you more bang for your buck.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
does it make your voice go higher or lower when inhaled?
Are you serious????
It's an experiment confirming QM predictions of reaction rates varying with mass, not a way to produce a hydrogen alternative for general use (because a fast decaying hydrogen that you need a particle accelerator to make is so useful...)
So what's interesting is that they were able to do this at all -- either they found a way to extend muon life (unlikely, or that would be the main news here), or they worked insanely fast to get their results before the decay.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
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.
Nah, it won't be useful outside of the lab. Those muons just decay too fast. This is very obnoxious, because muons catalyze fusion - they tighten up the nucleous, so it's easier for another atom to get in and fuse. If they lasted a bit longer (say 2x or 3x), then muon catalyzed fusion would be a practical energy source.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
Rick Santorum was right. Gay marriage leads to a slippery slope... man on man, man on dog, helium on hydrogen...
We've truly lost the culture wars.
I come in last night about half past ten,
That hydrogen wouldn't let me in.
So muon on over. Rock it on over.
Move over little atom, a mean, old atom's muon in.
Program Intellivision!
It seems that after infiltrating the molecular structure, the rogue atom saps the sentries before heading to the Intel Room to steal the briefcase.
There's no helium shortage. There's shitloads of it over there *waves in direction of Jupiter*
Fleming's team shot muons produced at the TRIUMF accelerator in Vancouver into a cloud of helium, molecular hydrogen and ammonia. The helium atoms captured the muons, then pulled hydrogen atoms away from the molecular hydrogen and bonded with them.
This was all done at TRIUMF, the world's largest cyclotron and by far the best particle accelerator in Canada. Plus, Donald Truhlar (a giant in the field) supported the experimental rate constants with quantum mechanical predictions - very neat stuff indeed!
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Rule #1: the joke has to be funny, at least funnier than the explanation, which is not the case here.
Don't forget C2He6O Highliumanol ofcourse ;-)
If it is a theory, it is supported by many strands of scientific evidence, and so should be taken seriously. But maybe it is not a theory, just a hypothesis. Please try not to misuse the word "theory", it only helps the creationists, quack doctors, climate change denialists and so on in their attempts to discredit science.
The atom has no physical shape. If the p1 orbital occupied by the single electron is similar enough "chemically", the effective radius will also be identical.
Alright, go and fetch a barrel.
I will. At that small a quantity though, there's going to be a considerable per unit cost. 1 barrel of Helium, from Jupiter, guaranteed delivery, will cost you $49 billion. I'll bring you the contract tomorrow, if you're interested.
Might I suggest you consider buying it in bulk?
Wow. For the first time I'm actually a little bit freaked out by a science story. They're disassembling an atom and making it behave like a different kind of atom? That's spooky. Here's why this spooks me: This strongly reminds me of the fictional substance "ice-nine" in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which was just a slightly "modified" form of water that was solid at room temperature. It had the unfortunate attribute that it would change any normal water into ice-nine on contact, thus causing a worldwide cataclysm when released into the wild. Until this moment I was unable to really picture how one could "modify" a simple molecule like H2O and wind up with something that was still H2O and thus still be able to call it "water". This technique would make that possible.
I hope and pray (to the mythical God that I don't even believe in) that these people messing with the basic structure of atoms know what they're doing. I've never put any stock in silly ideas like the LHC creating black holes or any of that other nonsense people come up with, but this particular story gives me the willies. Helium is one step away from hydrogen. What if they did something similar to a hydrogen atom and it turned out to be able to create new copies of itself just by somehow interacting with normal hydrogen molecules? To those who would immediately say "pish tosh" without thinking about the implications, I'd have to respond by asking how do we know such a thing can't happen when we go around mucking with the very nature of an atom's structure? It's one thing to go around breaking down molecules into their component atoms, or atoms into their component sub-atomic particles, but I think it may be a whole different ball game to go around creating hybrid atoms (and thus hybrid elements) with possibly unknown or unknowable interactions with other atoms/elements.
Or maybe I'm being silly and the scientists know exactly what they're doing. Riiiiiight...
I'll be even more spooked if I find out this sort of thing can't happen in nature. If they're managing to artificially create something that has never been able to exist in the entire history of the universe, it may be time to pull a Peter Griffin, i.e., "WHOA, WHOA, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whooaaa... Are you sure your math is right and you're not gonna destroy the universe?"
Scientists: "Yes."
Peter: "OK. Nevermind."
Scientists: "Whoops!"
Universe: "BOOOOM!!!"
P.S. The new Slashdot is broken. Good job guys. I tried to post this comment once already and it never showed up, but it's listed in the sidebar of my comment page and it wouldn't let me repost the same comment. Even though the link doesn't exist.