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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> 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.
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