‘Very sexy’Īs expected, the reaction with the disguised helium was the slowest, followed by normal hydrogen, then the light hydrogen.

Chemists formed this by replacing the proton in a hydrogen atom with an antimuon, the muon’s positively charged antimatter partner. The team compared how long this took with the rate of the same reaction using normal hydrogen, and with a reaction rate recorded in 1987 when a type of ultra-light hydrogen, called muonium, was used. The helium atoms captured the muons, then pulled hydrogen atoms away from the molecular hydrogen and bonded with them. The difference is that the nucleus is 4.1 times heavier than normal.įleming’s team shot muons produced at the TRIUMF accelerator in Vancouver into a cloud of helium, molecular hydrogen and ammonia. The remaining electron then behaves as if it were orbiting a nucleus with just one positive charge, just like the electron in a hydrogen atom. 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.īecause it is so heavy, the muon sits 200 times closer to the helium nucleus than the electron it replaces and cancels out one of the nucleus’s positive charges. A hydrogen atom has just one proton and one 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.Ī helium atom consists of a nucleus containing two positively charged protons and two neutrons, encircled by two orbiting electrons which carry a negative charge.

In a feat of modern-day alchemy, atom tinkerers have fooled hydrogen atoms into accepting a helium atom as one of their own.

Mass of a hydrogen atom