Deuterium

Deuterium (from the Greek Δεύτερος second), whose symbol is ²H, is a stable isotope of hydrogen found in nature with an abundance of 0.015% of total hydrogen atoms (one in 6,500). The deuterium nucleus is made up of a proton and a neutron (hydrogen has only one proton). When the isotope loses its electron, the resulting ion is called a deuteron.

Deuterium is also called heavy hydrogen. It can be named as ²H or as D. Although it is not a differentiated element in the strict sense (it is hydrogen), the differentiation between the properties of the isotopes is all the more pronounced the lighter the chemical element to which they belong. In the case of deuterium the differences are maximum since it has twice the atomic mass of hydrogen.

Deuterium was detected in 1931 by Harold Clayton Urey, a chemist at Columbia University. Urey won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.

The existence of deuterium on Earth, other parts of the Solar System (as confirmed by planetary probes), and in the spectra of stars is an important piece of information in cosmology. Stellar fusion destroys deuterium, and there are no known natural creation processes other than primordial nucleosynthesis, which could have produced deuterium in near-natural abundances observed for this element. This abundance appears to be a very similar fraction to that of hydrogen, wherever it is found. Thus, the existence of deuterium is one of the arguments in favor of the Big Bang theory instead of the steady state theory of the universe.

Deuterium combined with oxygen forms heavy water.

Deuterium Applications

Deuterium is useful in nuclear fusion processes along with tritium due to the large cross section of the reaction. It is also experimented with in other reactions such as deuterium + deuterium or deuterium + helium-3.

In chemistry and biochemistry, deuterium is used as a non-radioactive isotopic tracer in molecules to study chemical reactions and metabolic changes, because chemically it behaves similarly to ordinary hydrogen, but can be distinguished from ordinary hydrogen by its mass, using mass spectrometry or infrared spectrometry.

Antideuterium

Antideuterium is the antiparticle of deuterium. It is composed of an antiproton and an antineutron in the nucleus and a positron attached to it, in the same way that the electron is in the deuterium atom. The complete atom has not yet been created, but its nucleus (antiproton and antineutron) has, first produced in 1965 at CERN's Proton Synchrotron and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.