: do electric charges have mass?

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if we say voltage is work done on a single charge to move it across a circuit, and work is the force applies on a body of a certain mass to move it across a distance, are electric charges in a circuit bodies of mass?

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes, they’re electrons.

What is actually physically moving or flowing in a circuit are electrons, and those electrons do have mass. They’re have very very very very very very little mass, but they still have mass.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In metals, it’s the electrons that move.

In plasma, it’s ions that move.

In something like a water solution with ions in it (for example a salt solution), it’s the ions that move.

So in most cases, the particles that have the charge, also have mass. Mass and charge are fundamental properties of particles, and they are “independent” of each other.

For your specific question, though, the definition of “work” is [the displacement of energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics)), and while it may make sense to express it in terms of force and distance for kinetic energy situations where you have objects moving inertially or within a uniform gravity field, for electricity it makes more sense to [express work in terms of the voltage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(electric_field)).

So it’s probably better to think of work as “transfer of energy” and then look for a formula based on what energy you’re talking about, whether it be heat, pressure, electricity, gravity / kinetic, nuclear, and so on.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Voltage is potential difference between two points.

Work is energy which can be seen as a mass via E=MC^2.

Electricity is the transfer of electrons which moves electromagnetic energy.

Electrons have mass.

Think you need to get the basics sorted first because your question is really difficult to understand when you misuse terms.

Anonymous 0 Comments

As a matter of fact all known particles that carry an electric charge have a mass.

This begs the better question, “Why are there no massless charged particles?”

As far as I am aware there is not a solid theoretical reason why massless charged particles couldn’t exist–they just don’t. Also as far as I know, none of our other major theories require a massless charged particles to exist, so there is no reason to expect that they exist.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes electrons have mass. But the electromagnetic force does not operate on mass, it operates on charge. Charge is a property, so it cannot have mass. Although particles with charge do have mass (some of them don’t, kinda, see “holes”).

Work is change in potential energy, not just kinetic. So as charged particles move in an electric field, they gain/lose electric potential energy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

*Charge* doesn’t. Charge *carriers* do. At eli5 level: these are electrons, yes, the same things that are in atoms. The electrons in a conductor can move around between atoms and if you put an electric field on them they’ll move that way. And these are physical particles and F=ma just like for ball bearings.

Slightly more complicatedly, they *aren’t* electrons: they are electron-rich and/or electron-poor areas of your solid. The electrons are manifold and legion and always zinging around all over the place: the electron-rich or electron-poor area moves a lot slower than an electron should, if you just consider its mass and the force on it. This can be thought of as a result of the net forces on it being much smaller, or you can abstract that all out because what the charge carrier *behaves* like is an electron (or an anti-electron) with a different inertial and gravitational mass.

And that’s actually way more important, at normal temperatures and energies, than all this stuff about Hamiltonians and wavefunctions and ‘*an electron*’ as a separate particle not really being a thing you can observe in a solid for Quantum Reasons.