Can hydrogen and and antihydrogen bind to form a stable molecule?
That’s the question that a growing number of particlebods have been scratchin’ their eggs over. And it ain’t merely hypothetical, neither.
In the last few years, engineers at CERN in Switzerland and Fermilab near Chicago have been a-tinkerin’ and a-toyin’ with their particle traps and dramatically improved the numbers of antiprotons they can round up. All of a sudden, physicists have the building (and anti-building) blocks with which to test the question.
Of course, they ain’t got round to it yet which has left the field wide open to theorists. This week, it’s the turn of Mohamed Assad Abdel-Raouf at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain City. He’s run the first computations to calculate the bindin’ energies of so-called heterohydrogens (presumably ordinary homohydrogen is illegal in most middle eastern states).
He reckons various molecules of hydrogen and antihydrogen are possible. In particular, them eggs at CERN and Fermilab should keep ’em peeled for antihydrogen-hydrogen, antihydrogen-deuterium and antihydrogen-tritium, says the man.
Go to it fellas.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0711.2283: Possible Coexistence of Antihydrogen with Hydrogen, Deuterium and Tritium Atoms