The discovery of general means of orbital binding in my last post led me to consider more complex atoms. I first thought of revisiting lithium but considered there to be a lower hanging fruit. This is beryllium, the atom with four protons.
Beryllium-9 (mostly)
The reason why beryllium appeared more promising wasn’t because it was the next atom in line. For this, I would’ve revisited lithium. Rather, with beryllium, I could just copy paste helium to make an orbital with four spheres in a square (see below). However, there’s a catch. While this formed isotope of beryllium, beryllium-8 exists, it has a half-life of 8.19 x 10-17 seconds.
Beryllium in nature is mainly found as the isotope 9, with traces of isotopes 7 and 10. So how do we get beryllium-8? In particle accelerators, or atom smashers, as they’re sometimes called. But why is Beryllium-8 so unstable? That’s the next piece of the puzzle that I’ve been assembling.
Before answering why, I’ll try first to explain what. Beryllium-8 decays into two alpha particles. Alpha particle isn’t a helium atom, but rather a helium nucleus (He2+, or helium without two electrons). What this implies is that in Beryllium-8 the alpha particle is in the place of two electrons. Thus, quite likely, my orbital in the last post wasn’t actually the orbital of helium, but that of an alpha particle.
What this means is wasn’t at all obvious for me to begin with, but now I have a hunch. With a hunch I mean that I have something that’s logical at the outset but is still far from proven. The hunch is that in the fusion of deuterium into helium, two loops of two deuterium orbitals fuse to form a Helium atom. This leaves two unfused loops right next to each other. The helium atom is also connected to other helium atoms in a supramolecular orbital. If the neighboring unfused loops also fuse, this will release two electrons. One from each loop. This double fused orbital is an alpha particle. However, if you put two alpha particles side by side, the fused loops can disproportionate, so this time each deuterium unit is connected to a neighboring deuterium unit with a single loop. This would be beryllium-8. And conversely, such an orbital can also disproportionates to two alpha particles.
Ok, sounds sort of plausible. Am I confident about this? Not yet. But once I’ve suggested this, it’s easier for me to take the next step and see whether this logic falls flat on its face, or not.
So, what about the electron? I rather nonchalantly said that an electron is released when two unfused loops of neighboring deuterium units fuse. Doesn’t this sort of a claim require more proof? The short answer is “yes it does”. I just don’t have proof for this. I still might be completely (or partially) wrong. The thing about my though experiments isn’t to say that I know something for certain. I’m just foolish enough to make an educated guess. I just have more than twenty years of experience in the lab to be educated enough to make a guess.
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