I’m preparing for my Chem 2 final and this concept just confuses me.
If an electron is negatively charged, then how can it be positively charged? Wouldn’t that just make it a proton instead of an anti-electron? Does this mean that sub-atomic particles contain both negative and positive charges?
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You’re misunderstanding things a bit. Electrons are negatively charged and protons are positively charged, and both of them have their own separate anti-particles – positrons and anti-protons, respectively. These anti-particles are functionally identical to their normal counterparts outside of the charge.
An electron can’t become a proton because they are entirely different particles. You might be thinking of beta decay, where a neutron(±0) becomes a proton(+1) after it emits an electron(-1) and an antineutrino (±0). The overall charge remains balanced in that exchange.
Elementary particles have multiple properties that you can think of as “independent” of each other. Mass, spin, charge, color-charge, etc. So the designation of “anti-” is used specifically for when the electric charge is the opposite, and the other properties of the particle are the same.
So an electron and anti-electron are exactly the same (mass, spin, etc.) but of opposite charge. A proton and electron, on the other hand, they differ not just in charge (opposite), but also mass (proton is much much heavier).
In fact, if you look at what we currently consider THE elementary particles, electron is one, proton is NOT. Proton is composed of 3 quarks, so you can’t really draw a parallel between electron and proton as particles.
> If an electron is negatively charged, then how can it be positively charged?
It can’t, it would by definition be a positron, the antimatter version of an electron.
> Wouldn’t that just make it a proton instead of an anti-electron?
No, because an electron is not equivalent to a proton in ways other than its charge. A proton is about 1,836 times more massive than an electron, and is composed of two up quarks and a down quark. An electron on the other hand has no known components or substructure and is therefore considered an elementary particle.
> Does this mean that sub-atomic particles contain both negative and positive charges?
As above, not all of them. The electron for example is a particle with no underlying components, it just is what it is with no divisibility. Some other subatomic particles though do have underlying components in the form of quarks, which have the properties of electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. In the case of the proton the two up quarks each have 2/3 positive charge while the down quark has -1/3 charge, making the proton have +1 charge in summary.
>If an electron is negatively charged, then how can it be positively charged? Wouldn’t that just make it a proton instead of an anti-electron?
A proton is made of quarks, an electron is an elementary particle.
The antimatter counterpart of an electron (positron) has the same charge as a Proton, but has other different properties, like mass, fields that it interact with, etc.
>Why a nuclide can emit anti-particles?
Protons and Neutrons are made of quarks, (more specifically, up and down quarks). A proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark. it is possible for one of those up quarks to become a down quark (we call it a beta plus decay), when that happens, the proton becomes a neutron and a electron neutrino+positron are created as subproducts of this decay, and expelled by the nuclide.
> Does this mean that sub-atomic particles contain both negative and positive charges?
If you are implying that the particles and antiparticles are inside the atom, the answer is No! The antiparticle is a product created by the decay of some other particle (like the previous example of the beta+ decay)
Just to close this answer: AntiNeutron and AntiProtons aren’t emmited by atoms. They are created by different proccess
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