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Comment by icodestuff | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. I had no idea antiprotons -- well, an antiproton and an electron -- could orbit a nucleus. Does it fill up the usual quantum state of the first electron, or does it have its own set of quantum states to fill? Can they get a second antiproton to take the place of the second electron? I imagine that should be at least somewhat stable as the electrons of the enclosing container should repel the antiprotons just fine.

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Classical mechanics has F = ma. Quantum mechanics has Schrodinger's Equation. Given a probability distribution for the location of your particle, and the potential (as in classical mechanics, just the integral of the force), it describes how that probability distribution evolves over time.

For something orbiting a nucleus, the only parameters that matter are electric charge and mass.

This stuff was figured out in the 1920s, and is taught in a year or two of undergraduate physics. The examples are usually an electron orbiting a proton (the hydrogen atom), but work just as well for muons, or anything else. It's only once you get inside the atom that you get into more advanced stuff.

> Does it fill up the usual quantum state of the first electron, or does it have its own set of quantum states to fill?

Not a physicist. But if I understand correctly, it fits the same equations the electron would, except you have to use the proton mass instead of the electron mass, which means it's much closer in. The remaining electron (I think) doesn't have Pauli exclusion with the anti-proton, so it looks like the electron in a hydrogen atom. (Since it's much further out, it sees the effective charge of +1 for the "nucleus" of two protons and an anti-proton.)

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