Material disintegration by cold?

[MirceaKitsune]

I was recently sitting and thinking of atoms and physics. Something interesting popped to mind... which is likely explained and confirmed / infirmed, although I never saw the idea discussed anywhere.

 

Atoms are held together by the electrons around each nucleus, their spin influencing the strength of atomic bonds and the solidity of the material. The faster those electrons spin, the weaker the interaction. This is why most materials start to melt when it gets too hot, becoming liquid then gas. Oppositely, cold means that the bonds between atoms are stronger, so most materials get harder when temperatures are low.

 

But if my understanding of physics are right, materials should disintegrate at both temperature extremes. For heat it's obvious why... the electrons spin so fast that each atom loses its grip on its neighbor, leading from solid to liquid then to gas. But cold means that the electrons spin slower. And extreme cold should mean that the electrons... almost stop spinning at all. If they stop spinning, there should once again be no force to pull the atoms together.

 

Doesn't this mean that at extremely low temperatures, any material would eventually turn into something similar to ash or gas? What does happen to various materials (wood, metal, stone, etc) at extremelt low temperatures... so low that the slow spin of electrons cause atomic bonds to weaken? Can cold even turn solid metal or stone to dust?

[Spyman]

AFAIK heat in solids consists of the vibrations by the atoms or molecules and not the speed of their electrons.

[Delta1212]

Two points, I don't think your understanding of how chemical bonds work is entirely accurate, and also dust and ash are both solids. They're a bunch of tiny particles of solid materials, but they're still solid.

 

And just to throw in a third point: wood isn't a pure chemical substance. It's a very complex structure made up of a wide variety of chemicals that all have different melting/boiling points. You cannot melt wood or make it undergo any other phase transition as a single unit.

[MirceaKitsune]

Sorry about that. I used to think heat is the speed at which electrons orbit around the nucleus, which in turn determine the vibration of the atoms from one another.

 

Still, what would happen if electron spin and / or vibration went to extremely low levels? Is there a point at which the object would disintegrate, because there's not enough force to keep the atoms together?

 

And thanks for clearing that up regarding wood. It didn't catch me that its composition is a more complex and diverse molecular structure, which explains its different behavior at times (like burning rather than melting).

[Enthalpy]

Electrons have no speed around the nuclei. They use to be immobile, but have a volume because they're waves, and this volume can encompass several atoms, in which case the atoms are bound.

 

"Spin" is something else. Not related to the temperature, neither.

 

Heat is the movement of the atoms, which electrons can limit if the temperature isn't too hot. Electrons don't participate to it in most solids at usual temperatures.

 

As the bonding force doesn't result from electron movement, and heat isn't essentially electron movement, extreme cold doesn't disintegrate solids this way. Other processes exist, for instance if one region of a solid shrinks at cold while an other region is still warm, the difference of contraction can break the solid.

[swansont]

I was recently sitting and thinking of atoms and physics. Something interesting popped to mind... which is likely explained and confirmed / infirmed, although I never saw the idea discussed anywhere.

 

Atoms are held together by the electrons around each nucleus, their spin influencing the strength of atomic bonds and the solidity of the material. The faster those electrons spin, the weaker the interaction.

 

The speed of electron spin is undefined, since the electron is not physically spinning. The value of the spin is quantized. The only thing that varies is the orientation.