Why a nuclide can emit anti-particles (anti-electron, anti-proton, anti-neutron)

Question

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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Answer 1

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>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.

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> 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