This New Element is Lighter than Hydrogen. What?!?!

Visit brilliant.org/scishow/ to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription.

I just want to take a second to appreciate the phrase, "fairly easy to create in particle accelerators."

Hey! I’m actually going to be doing my master’s thesis in a particle physics group that aims to do exactly that, measure the (anti-)gravitational constant using muonium. Funny to see this pop up here.

Given that muonium contains no protons and atomic numbers denote the number of protons in an atom of a given element: Muonium is officially Element Zero (as long as you consider it to be its own element).

I'm pretty sure positronium is an even lighter form of "hydrogen", just an anti-electron (positron) replacing the proton instead of a muon. It does have a shorter lifetime than muonium, about 0.1 millionths of a second (100 ns) but it was produced at CERN as a part of the AEgIS experiment which, funny enough, is also trying to determine if antimatter falls up. Source: I worked on this this experiment briefly.

3:10 if you do consider muonium to be a quirky kind of hydrogen, would that mean protium, deuterium, and tritium are quarky kinds of hydrogen?

Very cool video. I received my PhD in muonium chemistry and have been working in the field since 1998, so it's very cool to see a video on this subject. Mu behaves chemically like atomic hydrogen and we study it for two different reasons. One is that we are interested in seeing what effect the light mass of Mu has on reactions (isotope effect). This can tell us a lot about how a reaction proceeds. We also study Mu under conditions where it is difficult to study H, such as in supercritical water. One point to note, at 3:53 the slowing down of muons through a degrader is described. Usually we don't do that. Instead we frequently use surface muons, which are produced from the decay of pions at the surface of the muon production target. These have an energy of about 4 MeV and stop in about 1 mm of water. A thin degrader of condensed noble gases is used to produced low energy muons at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. There they can produce a muon beam with energies of a few keV and can stop in tens to hundreds of nanometers. The muon beams are 100% spin-polarized and we use a form of magnetic resonance known as μSR to study the various chemical states involving muons as probes of materials. μSR is about 10 orders of magnitude more sensitive than conventional magnetic resonance techniques.

I get the oddest feeling that TECHNICALLY there is a whole seperate periodic table of elements with Muonium instead of the standard. We need to expand the table NOW

Weirdest "element" I read about was a nucleus that had four neutrons and no protons. It was made by bombarding regular helium with helium-8 [I know, it was new to me also]. The outcome was beryllium atoms and this short-lived element with zero protons. For those of you who are huge Mass Effect fans you can think of this as Element Zero.

2 millionths of a second is enough for muons to have a relationship with other particles, finish school, find a job, have children and family, and retire as an accomplished particle and here I am almost thirty years old with less than half that.

I think one of my favorite things I have learned from physics and chemistry and biology is that the universe seems to work on a “close enough” principle rather than perfect exactness

Speaking as a veteran sci-commer largely on bleeding edge physics, I have to say this is one of the best sci-comm presentations I've ever seen. I even learned some new things - rare in this particular arena - while all I came for was fishing for good new analogies. Sterling work.

This is insane, I wonder if there are other possible types of weird antimatter elements, like a positron and an electron orbiting each other

Well... This means in some non-zero degree of a plausibility, we could have a whole host of sci-fi unobtainium type materials out there yet undiscovered.

Does it form Mu²? That would be rad. What happens if you react Muonium molecules with oxygen? Anti-water? This is like a secret second page of the periodic table.

This was the craziest video I've seen from this channel in a long time. The whole concept is kind of blowing my mind. Atoms made from both antimatter and "normal" matter? That is pretty gosh darn cool.

The writer (Tom Rivlin) and editors (Bill Mead, JD Voyek) of this episode are incredible. Their skill of being able to explain such complicated subjects in such a digestible manner is peerless and deeply appreciated. Thanks for making such deep science accessible to so many more people!

I watch science videos on YouTube as kind of a hobby and I swear this is the first time I've heard about muonium. Mind-blowing. Thanks!

That is actually really exciting, being able to test how antimatter is affected by gravity can fundamentally change our understanding of the universe!

Leptons come in three flavors (ordered by mass): electron, mu and tau. So if an electron can be captured by an anti-muon then I suppose it is possible that an anti-tau can do the same. So, has anyone ever discovered the element Tauium ???