Radioactive beryllium-7 atoms locked inside molecular cages decay extraordinarily quickly, Japanese researchers have found. The speedup is the largest such artificial hastening of an atom’s decay rate ever observed.
Tsutomu Ohtsuki of Tohoku University in Sendai and his colleagues recorded a nearly 1 percent hike in the decay rate of beryllium-7 atoms that were each trapped inside a spherical shell-like, 60-carbon molecule known as a buckminsterfullerene, or buckyball.