Talk:Isotopes of helium

Halo nuclei
Are the halo nuclei of 6He and 8He the reason they have relatively long half-lives, compared to the other unstable isotopes of helium? XinaNicole (talk) 23:54, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Diproton
''Helium-2 is a hypothetical isotope of helium which according to theoretical calculations would have existed if the strong force had been 2% greater. This atom would have two protons without any neutrons.'' Would 2He be a stable isotope, or would it beta-decay to 2H in such a hypothetical universe? And if it were stable, does that mean 2H would beta-decay to 2He, since generally only a single nuclide of a given atomic mass is stable? XinaNicole (talk) 02:19, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Good questions, which we might start to answer if we could look up the source of this statement. I'll put a citation-needed tag on it. Dirac66 (talk) 01:38, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
 * This paper indicates that 2He would beta-decay to 2H with an unknown half-life. It also argues that very little 2He would be produced during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, and thus that universe would have a very similar primordial makeup, but that stellar nucleosynthesis would proceed quite differently, with the first step being 21H -> 2He, followed by decay to 2H and then further fusion, but with 3He not being burned and instead building up in the core.  He argues that, at the end of the hydrogen-burning phase, you'd have about 75% 3He and 25% 4He, followed by a 3He-burning phase and then a 4He burning phase! XinaNicole (talk) 10:50, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
 * An interesting paper in counterfactual physics (like counterfactual history :-)). Your free link does not give the source journal, but a Google search finds R.A.W. Bradford, J. Astrophys. Astr. (2009) 30, 119-131. It describes this hypothetical diproton state as "bound", meaning that the two protons would not immediately (10-23 s) separate due to coulomb repulsion as they would in the real world. However in Sec. 4 he considers the much slower weak (beta) decay, mentioning a possible time of the order of a year. So if this were correct, He-2 could exist for a reasonable time but would beta-decay. We still need the source of the calculations which give this result; possibly it is in one of Bradford's references.
 * Perhaps we can mention and link to Bradford's paper in the article. After the sentence you have quoted, we could add something like "Bradford [ref] has considered the hypothetical effect of this isotope on Big Bang and stellar nucleosynthesis." Dirac66 (talk) 02:15, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * A more recent paper also considers dineutrons. Still, not much changes in BBN, and stellar evolution remains pretty similar. Double sharp (talk) 06:05, 7 May 2024 (UTC)
 * 2He has a very lopsided(!) ratio of protons to neutrons for such a light element, so it would most likely decay to 2H in a hypothetical universe where helium-2 is bound. Double sharp (talk) 06:28, 24 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Diproton is most likely wrong name for 2He isotope, as it rather relates to
 * the di-protonic nucleus only
 * di-protonic phenomena (involving 2H+) in chemistry, e.g.
 * —Mykhal (talk) 16:57, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

It would be nice to reference old proton-proton low-energy (a few MeV) scattering experiments which might have revealed the resonance, or ruled it out for certain half-life ranges and resonance widths. The only half-life that I saw was much less than 10^-9 seconds. It would also be quite interesting if the diproton resonance were different inside a nucleus from free space. Johnm307 (talk) 04:12, 29 October 2020 (UTC)


 * I'm going a step further. It's a bad sign that old proton-proton scattering experiments aren't referenced.  They either would have detected such a resonance or would not have.  In either case, they would produce invaluable information.

Johnm307 (talk) 13:56, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Diproton in table
Should 2He (diproton) be included in the table of isotopes? Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty 13:56, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I would say no because it is still hypothetical. If its existence is ever confirmed then yes. Dirac66 (talk) 14:02, 27 July 2011 (UTC)


 * No, because it does not exist, and cannot, according to current theory. Plasmic Physics (talk) 14:03, 27 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you, but then why is it included in the table of nuclides? Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty 14:14, 27 July 2011 (UTC)


 * It shouldn't be there either, I don't know when it got in there, but it should go. Plasmic Physics (talk) 14:19, 27 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree that it should go, and I have continued this discussion at Talk:Table of nuclides. Dirac66 (talk) 15:32, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

If I ever find old published papers on proton-proton low-energy (a few MeV) scattering experiments, I will edit this myself. The 2He resonance would have been one of the first discovered. Johnm307 (talk) 05:01, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Improbably short half-life for He-2
The intro now claims (since 19 October 2011) that He-2 has a half-life of 3x10-27 sec. Where does this number come from, please? I will mark it "citation needed".

Such a short half-life would seem to violate the speed limit of the universe. The time to separate two protons by a nuclear diameter of 10-15m cannot be less than 10-15m / c = 3 x 10-24s, so the claimed half-life implies that the protons are separating at 1000 times the speed of light.

Also there is a measurement problem here. Extremely short half-lives cannot be measured directly, but are deduced from the width of some resonance. Here the width would be ħ / 10-27s = 107 J = 1 TeV. Real measured widths are much smaller than that.

If these simple arguments are incorrect for some reason, we need to see the evidence.

Also in the section on He-2, the last two paragraphs are not properly referenced. One cannot just say that "The best evidence of He-2 was found in 2008 at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, in Italy." We need a journal reference with author names, journal title with volume and pages and article title, and if possible an on-line link. Same for the Japanese and Russian work in the next paragraph. Does the 3x10-27s value come from one of these papers?? I don't know and I can't check if you don't tell me where the papers are. More "citation needed" tags. Dirac66 (talk) 14:37, 19 December 2011 (UTC)
 * P.S. Neither the Nubase nor the Nudat databases list a value for He-2. Dirac66 (talk) 21:48, 24 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I have now added a citation for the description of the Italian experiment. The information was hiding at Talk:Diproton. It says nothing about a half-live value or estimate. Dirac66 (talk) 15:10, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

He-2 decay to H-2 is also dubious and unsourced
Today 2H was added to the table as a supposed "daughter isotope" of 2He, as well as 2 1H which was already in the table. However if 2He to 2H really occurred, it would be a beta-plus decay (positron emission). This is difficult to believe since beta decay is a weak interaction which results in half-lives much, much longer than the 3 x 10-27 s claimed by the table for 2He. The two other beta-decay nuclei in the table are examples: 807 ms for 6He and 119 ms for 8He, compared to half-lives near 10-21 s for the neutron-emitting nuclei 5He, 7He, 9He and 10He. If 2He falls apart into two protons in 3 x 10-27 s (or even 10-21 s), it does not have time to beta-decay.

Once again we need sources for 2He, which is not listed in the Nubase or Nudat sources at the end of the article. I plan to just delete 2He from the table if sources are not provided soon. Dirac66 (talk) 20:00, 2 January 2012 (UTC)


 * The decay of 2He to 2H is the second step of the proton-proton chain reaction and is the rate-limiting step (the vast majority of the time it simply decays back into two 1H nuclei. Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty 20:43, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Hm - perhaps the claims about come from the astrophysics literature. The p-p chain reaction article describes the first step as  +  →  +  +  + $0.42 MeV$. I presume you mean that this occurs as two steps with the formation of  followed by positron emission.
 * I agree that the p-p chain is well established and can serve as evidence for positron emission. However I am not convinced that the system of two protons which emits the positron should be classified as a single (or diproton), which would require that it have a potential energy minimum deep enough to form a bound state. Is there evidence that this is so? If the potential energy curve of two protons is in fact repulsive, then the equation should be written as a single step, as it is now in the p-p chain article. We still need a reliable source to settle this question. If the answer is complex, it may be better to quote the exact words of a source document.
 * Also even if we can document astrophysical evidence for the existence of as a positron emitter, it should not be in the same table as the other isotopes for which the data is based on nuclear physics experiments and listed in NUBASE.

The source is Giovanni Raciti, et. al in Physical Review Letters, 16 May 2008. It is not the astrophysical decay of the diproton (which incidentally might happen far faster than it takes the protons to separate by any distance, since they never do, inasmuch as one proton turns to a neutron by emitting a W which itself decays before it has gone even 0.1 fm). Instead, the Italians used a beam of neon-20 ions against beryllium foil. Some neon nuclei were stripped of two neutrons to Ne-18, which exited the foil and impacted lead foil. The collision excited Ne-18 nucleus into a instability. One of the decay modes for excited Ne-18 is double proton emission plus O-16. These two protons don't come out randomly, but in a single lump in a single direction-- in other words, bound together for a (very very) short time. From the angle between the two product protons after their agglomerate He-2 does break down, you can tell how long it must have held together. That was the number these guys got. S B Harris 06:00, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, this is the source for the Italian experiment described in the diproton section of the article. I found it yesterday from a link in Talk:Diproton and inserted both the Science News Update and the Physical Review Letter as references. It answers some of the above questions but not all.
 * First the PRL letter of Raciti et al. speaks of a "pair of protons, correlated in a quasibound 1S configuration." To be true to the reference we should use this description rather than presenting 2He as a nuclide like any other.
 * The PRL does NOT mention 3 x 10-27 s or indeed any value for the half-life. The Science News Update just says "much less than a billionth of a second", which is hardly helpful. Perhaps the "number these guys got" is in another of their publications? Or somebody's comment on their work? I think it is important to track down the source and check the argument made and the exact wording of the claim made. It is after all an extraordinary claim, 104 times faster than the next fastest nuclide (7H) so we should be certain it is correct and add any necessary nuances before inserting it.
 * Positron emission is a separate issue. As Whoop whoop pull up points out, it is part of the p-p chain and there is much astrophysical evidence for that. I erred in saying that 2He "does not have time to beta-decay". As you point out, an individual beta-decay event can be very rapid. The very small probability accounts for the much longer half-life of beta decays. Dirac66 (talk) 16:31, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Who the #&@% is "Bradford"
Under the subtitle "Helium-2 (diproton)," the contributor suddenly introduces the name “Bradford” - as if we should all know who he is. Bradford is not a ‘Newton’ or an ‘Einstein.’ If he is not previously motioned, than his credentials should be stated to give validity to the article. At the very least, his full name (or initials) should precede his surname - try searching “Bradford” in the ‘search box.’ Manixx2a (talk) 23:46, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
 * At the end of the sentence there is a little [5] leading to a footnote which gives the author's initials (R.A.W. Bradford), and the article publication details (journal, volume, date, pages and title). Try Googling R.A.W. Bradford + astrophysics. Dirac66 (talk) 01:34, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

possible source for diproton
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/17/56/14/PDF/rpp.pdf Two-proton radioactivity - Bertram Blank ‡ and Marek P loszajczak †

Other is from RIKEN (?): http://fy.chalmers.se/~f2bmz/papers/korsheninnikov_2003_7h.pdf doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.082501 p 2: "corresponds to our expectation that the two protons from the reaction p ( 8He; pp ) 7H can undergo ﬁnal state interaction being emitted as a virtual singlet state 2He. This method was used in the study of 5H in the reaction p ( 6He; pp ) 5H [1]. \n When detecting the two protons by the RIKEN telescope, we obtain kinematically complete information about these two protons and, due to energy and momentum conservation in the reaction p (8 He; pp ) 7H, we can unambiguously reconstruct a mass of the residual system 7H. Also, we detected tritons and neutrons from the breakup of 7H using a downstream detection system consisting of a dipole magnet and plastic scintillators. This part of setup was the same as in our previous experiment described in Ref. [7]." `a5b (talk) 00:52, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

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Solar plasma
Generally accepted that hyperdense solar plasma (in stars) consists of intermingled electrons and nucei. At the energy and neutrino levels of solar plasma, "neutron decay" would equilibrate with neutron creation. D2 would probably turn to Deuterium by electron capture not positron emission like vacuum chamber experiments show, however Deuterium plus 1.9MeV(see neutron source wiki) is proton plus neutron (deuterium fissions). Or at solar plasma pressure is the reaction favoring Deuterium. If it does it means Deuterium >> Helium4 is a faster reaction. TaylorLeem (talk) 19:05, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

Regarding helium-2 in the "List of isotopes" table
Hello everyone!

I'm putting this message up to ask whether I should remove the row for helium-2 from the table, because it is currently not listed in AME2020. If the consensus is to retain the value, could someone please explain (if possible) where the current value comes from/how to calculate it? Also, while on the topic: what's the current scientific consensus and research regarding helium-2 at the moment?

(Sorry for the poor formatting)

MeasureWell (talk) 07:22, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Not in NUBASE2020 either. Because Nubase only lists isotopes with half-lives > 100 ns. Half-life of 2He is ~1x10-9. Also, dedicated section has more sources. -DePiep (talk) 17:57, 9 October 2021 (UTC)


 * But NUBASE2020 does include other isotopes with half-lives much shorter than 100 ns 4H = 139 ys = 139 x 10-24 s, 4Li = 91 ys, 5H = 86 ys, 5He = 602 ys, 5Li = 370 ys, etc. Dirac66 (talk) 18:55, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
 * You are trying to claim that the isotope does not exist because it is not in AME/Nubase. That is not how it works. The right route to falsify its existence is to prove that there are no RS sources *at all*. -DePiep (talk) 19:22, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Sigh. All I claim to have falsified is your claim that Nubase only lists when the half-life is greater than 100 ns. This is falsified because I have provided five counter-examples listed in NUBASE2020 with half-lives (much) shorter than 100 ns.
 * So why then is 2He not listed in NUBASE2020? Wikipedia does not require that one "prove" that there are no reliable sources (RS) because such a negative is impossible to prove. Wikipedia only requires that an editor provide a reliable source for a challenged statement.
 * In this case, the article now actually does cite the news item by Schewe, which says that 2He was detected and that "The new form of helium isn’t good for anything practical since it doesn’t survive even for a billionth of a second." To answer MeasureWell above, I think this is sufficient evidence to keep 2He in the table with the currently listed half-life of <<10-9 s. Years ago I objected because the article listed this same isotope with the incredibly short half-life of 3 x 10-27 s with no evidence, but that was another story. I think the Schewe item is sufficient to keep the mention of <<10-9 s. Dirac66 (talk) 20:59, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. The result agreed: not a reason to remove the line in the big table. -DePiep (talk) 10:56, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I found several sources unambiguously describing the existence of the diproton (2He). It is of much interest in nuclear astrophysics (stars and the p-p chain;, for example) and has also been detected in the decay of 18Ne . Echoing above, it's definitely enough to merit inclusion in the table (despite absence from NUBASE2020, though any new discoveries since 2020 won't be included either, so using that as a sole criterion is inappropriate). Probably there's also some additional content that could conceivably be added to the subsection. ComplexRational (talk) 23:03, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Deuteron/triton emission
If the daughter isotope of the rarer Helium-6 decay mode is Helium-4, isn't it double neutron decay? Similarly, if the daughter isotope of the rarest decay mode of Helium-8 is Helium-5, isn't it triple neutron decay? Why are these decay modes indicating simultaneous electron/proton emission with the beta decay symbol when the only difference between the parent and daughter nuclides across these decay modes is neutron count?

As far as I'm aware, the proper format for other isotope lists is Xn, where X is number of emitted neutrons (see Isotopes of Hydrogen) - deuteron and triton emission aren't shorthand for 2n and 3n decay modes, they're a separate decay type entirely (unless I'm misunderstanding something, they're more like alpha emission; they're referring to the emission of entire deuterium and tritium nuclei). InkTide (talk) 12:21, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

A ridiculous article in 1938 that claimed a stable 5He
The article can be found here. 2A04:CEC0:10EE:D636:ADA9:C82B:7392:6BE (talk) 11:08, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Could 2He possibly occur as alpha decay product of 6Be?
Since the decay mode of 6Be is 2p, could the two protons be considered as 2He in an instant? 2A01:E34:EC74:7170:C92D:3550:651:9FE3 (talk) 16:47, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Belli et al. (2019) consider 5He, 5Li, 6Be, and 8Be to be alpha emitters indeed. Double sharp (talk) 07:40, 11 May 2024 (UTC)