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!

The storngest acid is those sour gum balls..

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😂😂😂

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.

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

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

Some of these diagrams look vaguely like biblically accurate angels, and yes i am afraid

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.

13:08 That hydrogen was so badly bullied by the π electrons of that cyclopentadiene that it left and bound to the nitrogen.

What the actual hell is that cubane type acid? "Carborane" Nah that's HP Minecraft 💀

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

Triflic acid is super important to peptide chemistry! Its the only acid we have that is strong enough to remove some cysteine protecting groups that arent removed by TFA. It is vital to the chemical synthesis of insulin!

As a metal plater, sulfuric scares me. Considering for the process we’re using we dip the parts in 10 gallons 93% sulfuric/70 gallon water mix and then into a bath with 8 gallons 39% Hydrogen peroxide/10 gallons of another proprietary chemical blend/60 gallons water. So very very close to making a GNARLY piranha solution. Then mixtures of 100% nitric, 93% sulfuric, and ammonium bifluoride. Gosh chemistry is neat.

Put that Fluoroboric Acid in F tier! A "kinder gentler" super acid is like a kinder gentler machine gun. Perchloric needs to be A tier, because it was in "10 Clover Field Lane" and I wont spoil it but Perchloric did a really good job and deserved an Oscar Nomination for their outstanding work. Really, Perchloric deserved the statue, but Hollywood is so anti-chemical it would never happen.

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 highlighted H on the carborane acid is not the acidic one- the cluster "HCB11Cl11" is anionic. The super acid is [H+][CHB11Cl11-], where each boron has a chlorine and the carbon has a hydrogen. The acidic proton is the counterion H+. [Cs][CHB11Cl11], and the parent cluster [Cs][CB11H12] are not acidic.

I know Oleum is used to make spicy toulene. The first 2 nitrations can be done with just a mix of 2 common acids, but the third needs a little extra help from sulphur trioxide. Funny thing is that I knew the recipe long before I figured out what this "oleum" thing was..😂

"A lot of the time you'll have safety training to tell you specifically not to work with perchloric acid, and that is because it explodes stuff." Now I wanna work with it and make stuff explode...

Now you need to do the super caustic substances tier list and the pH neutral substances list.

An actual way to create a pentavalent carbon. The most well guarded secret of chemistry. I hope they won't make you disappear for putting out this video.

i have a cool story from high school. We were preparing some easy experiments to show at open day, such as chemical stoplight, methylene blue color change and Tollens reagent. While we were setting up the Tollens reagent, the teacher went under the fumehood and started pouring 30% ammonia in a beaker, which was needed for the experiment. For reasons i still don't quite get today, while he was surprised about not being able to pick up the smell cause the fumehood worked fine, he decided to lift the beaker and take a big sniff inside of it. Ammonia isn't that great smelling while concentrated so i have no idea how that could've felt. What i know is that a second later he was falling on the ground and we managed to help him to sit down. He stayed with his head on the desk for like 10 minutes and we were starting to get worried that we needed to call for help. Luckily he didn't sustain any damage and despite him dropping the beaker violently out of shock, nobody was hurt and there was no significant damage to the lab. He asked us to please not tell people about it, so it obviously became a huge meme among our class. One guy also wrote a report about it and gave it to the Italian teacher to read out. I rarely ever laughed that much again.

I felt those acid dropping mouth noises in my soul. Damn.

9:43 For anyone wondering, pKa scale is really intuitive in terms of energy, or in case of electrochemisty, voltage.

When it comes to superacids I feel like there's a gap between lab chemistry and industrial chemistry that would be helpful to bridge, if you know enough to comment when applicable. HF and H2SO4 are used at refineries to protonate alkenes. I think that's one of those millions-of-tons per year processes that underpin high material standards of living. It's one of the least niche uses of chemistry out there, and I wish I understood that big-picture stuff better.

I was a pipefitter in a DuPont plant in LaPorte Tx where they made sulfuric acid, turned it into oleum, then used the oleum mixed with flouro spar and steam and created HF...and then Flourosulfuric..maybe. Whenever we worked on those pipes we were in full acid suits. Even with the suit, getting them on you burned like hell. On bare skin, instant scaring.

Please keep using the frog, it’s so demented I love it

Have an old friend who works in silicon manufacture & etching, and he once casually mentioned he works with HF.. I asked him what it’s like to work with and his utter aloofness clued me in that his only knowledge of its strength was the safety procedures. Don’t get me wrong, he knew the safety procedures inside and out taking due diligence, but he did go into work the next day, mentioned our convo to his manager and asked if he could dissolve some glass boiling granules for me.. the mofo said yes. So I received a Snapchat the next day of him giggling dissolving some ultra fine glass and silicon oxide waste in his break lmao

Dont know why, but this is one of the best videos you've made. You've come a long way with the production value!

Love seeing all the quality improvements!!!

When I got my old job in the mining industry a couple years ago we still had a couple methods using perchloric acid, fun stuff. We actually phased it out while I was there just using more sulfuric and concentrated peroxide

As a glycobiologist I had a similar experience with triflic acid, sound included. I had to put my glycoprotein solutions in a dry ice bath because, as you put, it's very exothermic (I prefer my labmate's phrasing: "it's exothermic as f***")

I think you actually should go over the Hammett acidity function since pKa starts to become meaningless with superacids and are just based on estimations anyway using a comparison with a different solvent. In addition, since the definition of superacid uses the Hammett function instead of aqueous pKa, it actually means that HF is both a weak acid and a superacid using the definitions of those two terms.

You know it's gonna be a crazy tier list when *sulfuric acid* is just D tier

Thanks for the tips to dissolve the body of my victim of my murder

I would love to see a tier list on superbases

Keep it coming brother, these are top tier.

I thought most bases had the OH group and acids had just H (other than COOH). Chemistrys only rule is that there's always an exception to the rule I guess

Great video, i for one would like just a tad bit more leymans explanation for why some of these are so dangerous (the story about the caps is a good example). Im not a chemist so idk why a bunch of flourine atoms in a molecule is so scary to you guys or why certain bonds make you gasp, same with the nerve agent vid. Otherwise, great videos dude ❤

I watched this video yesterday and happened to receive an email from my undergraduate research advisor the same day outlining a procedure we followed today. Imagine my shock when I saw pure triflic acid! It was only a couple mL, and we handled it safely in a fume hood, but I will say that I am not "well-trained" to handle such materials as this video suggested.

Been watching your videos since a few days now and find them super enjoyable to watch even though my chemistry knowlegde doesn't go further than Ions

DMT is my favorite "super acid"

Ah yes, chemistry, i shall watch and pretend to understand

Damn, perchloric acid is scary, but is still used in fabricating metal parts as a polishing agent, as well as for etching. I would ask for a pay raise if I worked with that on an industrial scale.

0:10 Ah, the "which you wouldn't typically think of" qualifier. Also seen in hyper-oxygenating compounds like FOOF and other devil accelerants. 6:40 THERE we are. The acid-oxidizer combo!

Anything that can protonate methane should be called a super duper acid

I always wondered what made acid. Great video!

Not me thinking this video was about some really dope LSD.

I really appreciate the explanations for why some of the more exotic structures are acidic, like the low electron density in the carbon acids.

Perchloric acid in anhydrous acetic acid is a standard reagent in analitical chemisty 😅

I love super acids! I did a bare bones basic overview paper on them for my Inorganic Chem's final paper. Weird and horrifying are the best adjectives for them!

On the movie "Alien", the alien's saliva would easily eat holes through the decks of the space ship. Maybe there was a super acid in his saliva. 😆

My only chemistry knowledge is "layman" based on 10th grade (which was long time ago). I still loved this video. A lot the references went over my head (which is rare in a science context), but your commentary and vocal inflections CLEARLY let me know that some of these things are freaking dangerous 😂. Love it.

Love triflic acid. Legit saved my ass during PhD

I once tried storing my triflic acid in a vial with a rubber septum cap on to seal it. Later I found a nasty rubber goo instead of a nice liquid and the septum sealing was totally destroyed.

11:55 The hydrogen on the carbon of the carborane cage isn't labile. That entire molecule is the anion, and representations usually omit the acidic proton since it doesn't associate strongly with any particular part of the molecule; it tenuously coordinates with the chlorine atoms in the solid phase of the one you show but other carboranes with different substituents on the boron atoms will have even more labile bonding with the proton. I remember reading some papers a few years back about efforts to synthesize carborane anions with -F and -CF3 substitution on the carbon atom, which is apparently difficult to do, in the hopes of further pushing how poorly coordinating the anions can get.

I was fixing a pipe at a steel mill and was near a slag shoot, it missed the bin and hit a bucket of airing off hydrochloric acid and splashed. In slow motion I watched a single drop hit my finger. Almost painless, it smoked for a second and left a scar.

I work occasionally with fluoroboric acid doing MAAD because it is generally safer to handle than HF so we "neutralize" HF by adding a bunch of boric acid, also helps with solubility of some metals since fluorides can be pretty non-soluble but the excess borane afaik pulls the fluorine off of the metals.

The pKa of sulfuric acid in water is -2.8 and not 2.8 as you stated.

Christopher Reed had an UNDERGRAD make the fluorinated carborane acid, which needs HF/F2 to make. I think they published it in Angewandte. Quick correction: The CH you highlight on the carborane acid isn't the acidic one - what you drew is the just the anion itself. The proton of carborane acid jumps between the eleven thoroughly-uninterested chloro groups in solution and forms a hydrogen bonding polymer in the solid state. Still, love your tier list and agree with it 100%.

could you do a tier list of compounds containing platonic solids? i just really like how they look

You should do a "scary substances I haven't worked with" tierlist

Yeah anytime HF is mentioned my body has a pavlovian response. Microelectronics lab here and while we work with a whole lot of different acids and solutions, the one that is always labelled with big prominent stickers on every machine that uses it and we don't fuck with ever is HF. That stuff is terrifying.

-20 pka is the most cursed thing ever, I went deaf hearing him say it.

Hey, I love your videos but I feel like I'm missing a lot, is there a starter video or playlist you can recommend to get a better context of what you talk about in videos?

I don't know crap about chemistry and I'm also failing my class however this dude makes it interesting

Did the Briggs Rauscher reaction as a lab project and had to work with perchloric acid. Thankfully only like 5ml and not heated either but my teacher poured it into the measuring thing for me with neoprene gloves. The data sheet sure scared me though.

With HSbF6 you can complete the alkilation of benzene with CH4 in one step. Basicly it is a super catalyst.

Yeah the first time I had to work with triflic acid (distilling several grams, FFS) I asked the guy who used to do the reaction if I could pull it up with a syringe and he was like "yeah sure". So I did, and 1 minute later I noticed drops dripping down my sleeve. Luckily it was winter, so the acid had to burn through the thick gloves, the lab coat and my thick sweater, so I had enough time to realize what was going on and throw it away. I was unscathed, but my clothes were completely ruined. Fast forward to an year later, and I had to do the same reaction again, but we didn't have enough acid. So I went to borrow it from another group. The guy pulled out the bottle, and started to pour it in a plastic vial whilst wearing thin gloves. I was like "dude NO! Just give the whole bottle, it's safer" Very dangerous how almost everyone I met underestimated it.

Great vid < 3 also how much of each super acids do you need to dissolve a 200 lbs hairy chicken (with alot of bones)?

What's the pKa of the proton beam at CERN?

One of the few of these I, a non-chemist, have heard about is perchloric acid. Specifically from John D. Clark's "Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants". An excellent book as Clark is an excellent storyteller. The amount of nasty chemicals they worked with in early liquid rocketry is staggering. Derek Lowe's blogs are also amazing reads for "interesting" chemicals.

My lab partner and I once cleaned up for someone who left us a sour analysis of halides (including fluoride) in a test tube. As my partner took it with his bare hands everything poured out at the bottom because the glass got disolved by HF, and luckily I saw it and told him to drop it instantly, since it's known to be deadly by just a few drops onto the skin lol

the bootleg pepe will forever haunt me in my chlorine-siffing induced dreams

you should do a video tasting various acids, adjusted to the same sourness

I love the carborane molecule...it's beautiful to me. I'm not at all a chemist but I feel like the center of the molecule could be used to trap a troublesome molecule or atom.

I've worked with a guy, who had to use pyridine HF So he poured it into a glass three neck rbf and half of it literally dissolved and a dropping funnel was stuck in a neck of that rbf so the upper part looked like some sort of a champion cup

Imagine combining some of these different super-acids to make a hyper-acid or an ultra-acid. Also surprised you didn't mention piranha solution.

Nice! Never heard about a few of those

the longer i looked at some of the compounds the more i started laughing nervously

"yeet molecules apart" - a fantastic description

Super acids are often studied by people who are given grants to study super acids. Sounds obvious, right? Even That Chemist said it. But think about it this way. They're job is literally to invent more work for themselves.

I handled pure sulphuric acid in secondary 3... It have a oily aspect by it's high viscosity.

H2SO4: I'm a strong acid. HSbF6: You are a base.

Just winterized a customer's pool today. Their copper heat exchanger was gushing. I'm pretty sure their water would have made this list- pH indicator was off the scale yellow (very acidic) with 20+ ppm free chlorine ☠

Hey, remember me? I am the guy that worked with kg amounts of triflic. may i say? i am super well trained lol. been on your discord now quite some time, mostly hang out in the homemade chem channel since i no longer work in the industry ^^

5:40 "Pff pff pff tsch acid" Beautiful description of a mild super acid 😂

THAT CHEMIST JUST DROPPEDDDDD!!!

Missed opportunity to call Oleum Oldeum instead of boomer’s acid

The cocktail gon be hitting hard after replacing lemons with some of these bad bois