Given that I have absolutely no real understanding of chemistry, what implications does this have?
Chemists Confirm the Existence of New Type of Bond
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Re: Chemists Confirm the Existence of New Type of Bond
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
The antimuon is "proton-like" for a lot of purposes: it has a +1 charge and it's much heavier than an electron. So you've got a heavy bit with +1 charge and an electron orbiting it, you call it hydrogen.
It would have been very nice had the article said that, and described what "muonium" is. I took it to be a proton plus a muon, not an anti-muon plus an electron. To describe it as "a hydrogen isotope" is just about the optimal mix of uninformative and misleading!
That's funny, because despite having no clue what muonium is, I instantly knew that line was typical science journalism bullshit. Am I too cynical or does dumbing down something to the point it makes no sense have actual value for some people?
Re: Chemists Confirm the Existence of New Type of Bond
#23Why is the muonic hydrogen required? From the Bohr formula the Rydberg energy of the muonic hydrogen would be some 200 times larger than regular hydrogen. Anyone know how that plays a role? It can't be sqrt(spring/mass) for vibration since the proton is anyway already some 2000x heavier than the electron. Unless spring somehow depended on the Rydberg energy, which is possible since the P.E-K.E would depend on mass vi…
This is muonium: anti-proton plus electron, not muonic hydrogen (proton plus muon). I made the same mistake: it's a very poorly written article.
Thanks for pointing this out.
The role of muon instead of proton could be: (i) to make the bond detectable as the muon decays, or (ii) 10X lighter mass of muonium compared to regular hydrogen leads to a dynamical regime with saddle points in P.E vs K.E (as pointed out earlier).