Re:Antiproton Orbiting Helium Ion
by pdonis on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @02:33PM
(#30702332)
> how is it actually falling into it's surface? Is it just tunneling into contact?
Kinda sorta. As fsh responded elsewhere in the thread, the difference between the antiproton and an electron is that the antiproton can annihilate with one of the protons in the helium nucleus (since it's an exact antiparticle of the proton, whereas an electron is not). The probability of this annihilation happening per unit time depends, roughly speaking, on how much the antiproton's wave function overlaps with the wave function of the protons in the nucleus, which in turn depends on which orbital the antiproton is in. But the overlap will be nonzero in any orbital, which means that this configuration is kind of like a radioactive atom: the question is not whether it will decay--eventually it will--but how long it will take on average. The "half-life" of the antiproton configuration in this experiment was on the order of microseconds, which is quite long for an antiproton.
Kinda sorta. As fsh responded elsewhere in the thread, the difference between the antiproton and an electron is that the antiproton can annihilate with one of the protons in the helium nucleus (since it's an exact antiparticle of the proton, whereas an electron is not). The probability of this annihilation happening per unit time depends, roughly speaking, on how much the antiproton's wave function overlaps with the wave function of the protons in the nucleus, which in turn depends on which orbital the antiproton is in. But the overlap will be nonzero in any orbital, which means that this configuration is kind of like a radioactive atom: the question is not whether it will decay--eventually it will--but how long it will take on average. The "half-life" of the antiproton configuration in this experiment was on the order of microseconds, which is quite long for an antiproton.