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Some stable helium-3 is produced in fusion reactions from hydrogen, but it is a very small fraction, compared with the highly energetically favorable production of helium-4. The stability of helium-4 is the reason that hydrogen is converted to helium-4, and not deuterium (hydrogen-2) or helium-3 or other heavier elements during fusion reactions ...
This condensation occurs in liquid helium-4 at a far higher temperature (2.17 K) than it does in helium-3 (2.5 mK) because each atom of helium-4 is a boson particle, by virtue of its zero spin. Helium-3, however, is a fermion particle, which can form bosons only by pairing with itself at much lower temperatures, in a weaker process that is ...
Alpha decay (the emission of a 4 He nucleus – also known as an alpha particle – by a heavy element undergoing radioactive decay) is common in part due to the extraordinary stability of helium-4, which makes this type of decay energetically favored in most heavy nuclei over neutron emission, proton emission or any other type of cluster decay.
The research team also detected helium-4 within the rocks. While helium-4 is common on Earth, helium-3 is more readily found elsewhere in the cosmos, which is why scientists were surprised to ...
Atoms can have different overall spin, which determines whether they are fermions or bosons: for example, helium-3 has spin 1/2 and is therefore a fermion, whereas helium-4 has spin 0 and is a boson. [ 2 ] : 123–125 The Pauli exclusion principle underpins many properties of everyday matter, from its large-scale stability to the chemical ...
Duluth Metals found the reservoir by chance in 2011 when the company was searching for platinum and palladium and hit a pocket of pressurized gas that testing identified had 10.5% helium.
The unusual stability of the helium-4 nucleus is also important cosmologically: it explains the fact that in the first few minutes after the Big Bang, as the "soup" of free protons and neutrons which had initially been created in about 6:1 ratio cooled to the point that nuclear binding was possible, almost all first compound atomic nuclei to ...
Four of those pillars of stability are the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, and Amazon Rainforest, and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—the ocean current ...