A while ago, can’t recall where or when, I read that a fully-ionized atom of element 137 should be the strongest acid, as it would be able to pull electrons out of the vacuum due to the fact the fine-structure constant is approximately 1/137. Does this have even the odor of reality about it?
Also, is there a way to predict how long an atom of an element we haven’t made would last? If there is, what’s the predicted half-life of element 137?
Your first question has the odor of reality about it, in that it is possible for a sufficiently-strong electric field to polarize the vacuum. But without doing any actual calculations, I don’t think the argument actually holds water. If that were all there were to it, then element 137 could just as easily pull muons or tauons out of the vacuum, since those have the same charge as electrons. An actual calculation would have to involve the electron’s mass, too, not just its charge.
And it is possible to predict half-lives of heavy elements, but the calculation involves the strong nuclear force, which we don’t understand all that well, so the calculations are both difficult and not very precise. I don’t know enough myself to be able to even make a stab at the answer to that one, beyond saying that it would be extremely short.
Well, that response was prompt, very interesting, and honestly a little mind-bending, what with the idea of polarizing the vacuum. Would it be possible for us to test this by generating a magnetic field equivalent to what a fully-ionized atom of element 137 would create?
From here:
From here, for Copper (element 29) the 29th ionization potential (last electron removed) is p = 11567.617 Ev.
The mass of an electron Me is 510998.9 Ev.
Setting Me = p * (Z-1)^2/(29-1)^2 gives (Z-1)^2 = Me * 28^2 / p or Z = 1 + sqrt(Me/p)*28
This gives Z = 187.
I’m not sure how accurate that Moseley’s law is. I tried a fit over the first 10 elements, and it wasn’t flat out near 9 and 10 unless I changed the exponent to about 1.8. But then I decided to just grab the highest element I had the last ionization potential for, and call it close enough.
A fully ionized anything will be a better electron acceptor than any acid. But, I wouldn’t call an ionized atom an acid on its own, as it’s cheating by not being neutral. (A proper acid would accept electrons and make itself negative, balancing the positive-ness of whatever it accepted that electron from.)
There is no relation between having 137 protons and the fine-structure constant.
Without seeing the particular thing you read, I might guess that they were calculating the influence of the vacuum on energy levels in highly ionized atoms. This is a bit less spectacular than having 137 protons sitting there spawning electron/positron pairs.
You’ll need to expend the energy equivalent of two electrons rather than just one (since you also need to make a positron).
Did I say 187? I meant 264. 