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Re:Antiproton Orbiting Helium Ion by photochemsyn on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @01:51PM (#30701858)
The stranger case is really the electron, which just sits there and never falls to the nucleus (that's the original conundrum of the model of the atom as negative electrons orbiting a positive nuclear center). Physicists applying QM to the hydrogen electron found that the electron could only exist in certain energy levels, and drew the analogy of standing waves to explain it, hence 'wave equations'. The electron is no longer a point orbiting another point, but a wave function delocalized over the entire orbital.

These electron quantum rules don't work the same for an antiproton, which is 1800X more massive than an electron. There's probably some other factors, like the antiproton can get close enough to the nucleus for strong force effects etc.

Re:Antiproton Orbiting Helium Ion by Sharlin on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @02:39PM (#30702399)
An electron orbital overlaps with the nucleus, though; any bound electron can in a very real sense be said to exist partly inside the nucleus all the time. But electron–nucleon physics don't care. In particular the electron does not feel the residual strong force. The situation is different with a bound antiproton, however. If the antiproton wavefunction ends up sufficiently overlapping with the wavefunction of one of the nuclear protons, they will annihilate.