Perhaps this is another bug in our home computer. You know, the one that’s simulating our Universe. At least, this weirdness sounds like it. From NewScientist (22 September 2018, extended):
Chemists have a plan to make ghosts in the lab, by bonding an atom to a patch of empty space.
Normal chemical bonds anchor two atoms together, usually through sharing their electrons. Now, theorists have worked out how to trick a single hydrogen atom to form a bond with nothing, by luring the atom’s lone electron into the same position and state it would be in a real bond.
Matt Eiles of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana and his colleagues are building on work from two years ago that saw the creation of strange, super-sized bonds in other molecules, such as diatomic caesium.
In that case, one caesium atom is in a rare condition called a Rydberg state, which allows its bonding electron to stretch up to a thousand times further than normal from the other caesium atom, essentially forming a super-sized bond.
Eiles says that by imitating this Rydberg state with single hydrogen atom, they can make it bond to nothing. The trick involves exposing the hydrogen atom and its electron to a series of delicate magnetic and electric fields.
“We predict it would live for several hundred microseconds, or even longer in a cold environment,” says Eiles. But his team won’t be trying to make any ghostly bonds. “As simple theorists, we’ll leave this challenge to the experts, the experimentalists,” he says.
Ah, it’s all theory. Some folks think it can be done, but until it is done, no one can be sure. And is it really a bond, or just an anomaly in the path of the electron? Does that even make sense to say for a quantum particle?
Still sounds like a bug to me.
