After losing its electron is there still something identifying it as hydrogen? Are all lone protons just hydrogen cations?
In: Chemistry
A single lone Proton is Hydrogen, with or without an electron.
It’s a cation because it has a positive charge.
Specifically it’s H1 or Protium, while Hydrogen with 1 Neutron is H2 or Deuterium, and with 2 neutrons it’s H3 or Tritium which is radioactive.
A hydrogen cation is often called called a proton, because unless it is deuterium or tritium it *is* a lone proton.
There really aren’t a whole lot of lone protons floating about, except in solution.
It’s a matter of context. You might call an H+ ion a “hydrogen cation” in chemistry, when you’re interested in how it combines with an anion, but if you’re doing particle physics and you have some protons in a particle accelerator beam, you’d probably just call those “protons”.
It’s like how a “beta particle” is just an electron, but you call it a “beta particle” when it’s being emitted from a radioactive nucleus. In chemistry, you just call it an electron.
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