Uranium magnet (2015)

Yeah i know right? Orbitals where a big thing in my chemistry degree, and magnetic fields are basic but until reading this i don't think I'd ever heard or thought about the orbitals changing shape in mag fields. They change shape in reactions and depending on what the element is bound to. Maybe it's only something that happens in the superfields they have there? I don't know. Apparently these U alloys have weird behavior on top of that, too.

Antimony is a metal so they will call it an alloy. But there could also be a spectrum or clear demarcation between alloy and compound from a definition perspective, I don't know.

I think it's cool this alloy actually looks like a crystal (ie, it's clear) rather than a metal. The only other metal thing I know that does that is ALON a transparent Aluminium ceramic, but there are probably lots.

I think the difference between compounds, alloys, ceramics and glasses is maybe complex, but has something to do with the atomic lattice structure of the solid form. Ceramics and glasses will be less regular than compounds. Alloys I'm not sure!

Both the movement of the nucleons inside nuclei and the movements of the quarks inside nucleons are affected by magnetic fields (because the neutrons have magnetic moments, while the protons and all quarks have both magnetic moments and electric charges), so it is expected that in the presence of magnetic fields there is some splitting of the nuclear energy levels, similar to the splitting of the atomic and molecular energy levels caused by a magnetic field, which can be detected in the atomic and molecular spectra.

The changes in the nuclear energy levels should cause small changes in the decay rates.

Nevertheless, such changes might be too small to be measurable, because for particles that move much slower than the speed of light the magnetic forces are extremely small in comparison with the electric forces and even smaller in comparison with the strong nuclear forces.

The influence of magnetic fields on atomic spectra is very small, even if the electrons move much faster than the nucleons. The changes in nuclear energy levels caused by magnetic fields would be much smaller, while the distances between nuclear energy levels, which determine the decay probabilities, are much larger than in atomic spectra.

It seems very likely that the magnetic effects are too small to be measurable.

Actually, I’m pretty sure strong magnetic fields can effect the rate for beta-capture decay. There are some promising results when googled.

After all, it involves capturing an electron from the electron cloud so it’s not too far stretched to think a force that effects the electron cloud could change the decay rate.