What are Super Acids? (Super Acid Lore)

Just for your own knowledge, fluoroantimonic acid is a component in some photoresists. We don't use a lot of it, obviously, because the stuff is horrifying. But if you want a really good masking job with some pretty solid etching, there's no better game in town.

My untrained takeaway from this is that the Large Hadron Collider is the world's most powerful acid when firing protons

More like old-eum

When Sulfuric acid is one of the weak kids on the block you know it's a scary list

New phobia unlocked: Surprise protonation by super acid when you don't want to be protonated

Learning that the PH scale is logarithmic really changes how you look at acidity

This is what makes acids so fun to talk about and SO TERRIFYING!!! Fluoroantimonic acid is 20 QUINTILLION times stronger than 100% sulfuric acid. It’s wild. You do not want to mess with any of these!

Chemists: "Protonating" "Oxidizing" etc. What it really is, for example for piranha solution: "Hey! You! Organic molecule! Eat this Proton! Eat that oxygen!" It's basically a bully throwing protons (H+) and oxygen at any organic molecule until it gets completely ripped apart into only CO2 and Water. So you can throw most organic molecules/substances into piranha solution (not even a super acid) and it gets protons and oxygen fired at until it completely degrades to carbon dioxide and water. Nothing, really nothing gets left of it. The CO2 bubbles out and the water slightly dilures the already aqueous piranha solution. Absolutely amazing to witness this chemical madness 😅

I work with a lot of acids and explosive catalysts. We keep large amounts in refrigerated outdoor bunkers. About 750 ft away from the building. A few of them will spontaneously combust and/or explode when they reach 50 degrees F. It's absolutely terrifying moving these material inside. We've only had one bunker explode due to a temperature probe failure combined with a refrigeration failure. I'm told the fireball was magnificent. The safety team was happy because the facility is rated at an 8 mile blast radius and that theory luckily wasn't tested that day.

It's so acidic it can protonate hydrogen... Well, I've learnt something scary today.

Carbon in CH5+ is not pentavalent since the bond between two of the hydrogens and the carbon becomes a three-center two-electron bond. So you are kinda protonating the bond between the carbon and the hydrogen, which I find even more interesting

I've been an HVAC technician for over 20 years now, I used to use HF to clean condenser coils, one day my father decided that this jug in my truck looked like window cleaner, as it was in a 1 gallon plastic container and it was dyed blue. So he went ahead and washed his windshield, and wouldn't ya know it, about a week or so later it was opaque😂😂😂

My biochemist ass made it to "protonating sulfuric acid" and I lost my shit tbh. I'm gonna have a drink and finish this video later.

Honorable mention -the hydrogen isotope tritium is radioactive and undergoes beta decay decay forming a helium ion. If it was in the form of a gas beforehand, this will form a helium hydride ion HeH+ :a superacid with a theoretical pka of -63. This protonates basically anything, stuff like oxygen or hydrogen even

i worked with this very anxious girl in 1st year who didn't want to touch the acids and kinda just watched me doing the experiments (which i didn't mind because i had a huge crush on her) until one day were i explained to her that the 0.1mol HCl we were working with is weaker than stomach acid and "that's inside you all the time so you'll be fine with this" with her new found confidence she takes the bottle, and completely misses the beaker spilling it all over her eczema covered hand i got backhanded that day

The storngest acid is those sour gum balls..

A little surprised you didn't mention anhydrous HF, as it self ionizes into bifluoride (HF2-) anions and the highly protonating H2F+ cation, making it substantially more acidic than H2SO4's Hammett acidity function (hereafter H0) of ~-12 with anhydrous HF being -15 - nothing like its weak acidity in aqueous solution. Though much like with water and ammonia autoprotolysis does weird things to certain acidity functions, and for the superacids here with HF in them HF is... technically acting as a base. Also, IIRC the sulfuric acid definition of superacid sets the cutoff at H0 = -12 defined by pure anhydrous sulfuric acid, but pure anhydrous sulfuric acid doesn't actually exist because the pure form is in equilibrium with several species that INCLUDE water at a low concentration - pure H2SO4 slightly dilutes itself into an aqueous solution simply by existing. Of course if we're including protonating ions we'd be remiss to exclude the venerable (because it was one of the first compounds formed in the universe) and friendly (this is a lie) helonium, with very cool formula of "HeH+" and its very normal H0 of -63. Yes, that's 10^51, or one sexdecillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more acidic than 'pure' (see above) H2SO4. Was acidity a mistake? No, it's the chemicals that are wrong.

Perchloric acid should be the one called boomer acid because it makes things go boom

I think this would win the ultimate yikes award (for stupidity), being a science lab story from when i was in middle school. It was years ago, so some details are a little fuzzy. We were in a morning lab class, getting to use the bunsen burners to heat up test tubes for... some reaction, which is unimportant. The important part is, one of my classmates had the genious idea to heat up a pair of metal tongs with the open flame of the bunsen burner, and then use them to grab another of my classmates' necks from behind. The victim was left with burns that i think scarred over, and our resident 'genious' earned himself a few days of in school suspension.

you are the reason I'm deciding to minor in chemistry as a music major! we'll see how that goes lol