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Chemists have a plan to make ghosts in the lab, by bonding an atom to a patch of empty space.

Normal chemical bonds anchor two atoms together, usually through sharing their electrons. Now, theorists have worked out how to trick a single hydrogen atom to form a bond with nothing, by luring the atom鈥檚 lone electron into the same position and state it would be in a real bond.

Matt Eiles of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana and his colleagues are building on work from聽two years ago that saw the creation of聽strange, super-sized bonds聽in other molecules, such as diatomic caesium.

In that case, one caesium atom is in a rare condition called a , which allows its bonding electron to stretch up to a thousand times further than normal from the other caesium atom, essentially forming a super-sized bond.

Eiles says that by imitating this Rydberg state with single hydrogen atom, they can make it bond to nothing. The trick involves exposing the hydrogen atom and its electron to a series of delicate magnetic and electric fields.

鈥淲e predict it would live for several hundred microseconds, or even longer in a cold environment,鈥� says Eiles. But his team won鈥檛 be trying to make any ghostly bonds. 鈥淎s simple theorists, we鈥檒l leave this challenge to the experts, the experimentalists,鈥� he says.

Some are up for it. 鈥淚 think it could actually be done,鈥� says Johannes Wilhelm Deiglmayr of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and co-leader of the team that made the unusual caesium molecules. 鈥淭his would be really fun to see.鈥�

If such ghostly bonds are ever created, Eiles says it would be interesting to see if they react with other molecules, or alter聽the rate of chemical reactions