This article needs additional citations for verification. (October 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
An onium (plural: onia) is a bound state of a particle and its antiparticle. They are usually named by adding the suffix -onium to the name of the constituting particle except for muonium which, despite its name, is not a bound muon–antimuon onium, but an electron–antimuon bound state, and whose name was assigned by IUPAC. A muon–antimuon onium is called true muonium.
Positronium is an onium which consists of an electron and a positron bound together as a long-lived metastable state. Positronium has been studied since the 1950s to understand bound states in quantum field theory. A recent development called non-relativistic quantum electrodynamics (NRQED) used this system as a proving ground.
Pionium, a bound state of two oppositely-charged pions, is interesting for exploring the strong interaction. This should also be true of protonium. The true analogs of positronium in the theory of strong interactions are the quarkonium states: they are mesons made of a heavy quark and antiquark (namely, charmonium and bottomonium). Exploration of these states through non-relativistic quantum chromodynamics (NRQCD) and lattice QCD are increasingly important tests of quantum chromodynamics.
|Look up onium in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.|
|This particle physics–related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.|
|This quantum mechanics-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.|