in atom is electrically neutral explain
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By definition, an atom is electrically neutral (i.e. has the same number of protons as it does electrons, plus some number of neutrons depending on the isotope). If a species were charged, it is referred to as an ion (cation for positively charged and anion for negatively charged species), also by definition.
But this is probably not a very satisfying answer. (I personally find answers based on definitions pretty bland.) Perhaps an interesting follow up question is...
Is the universe electrically neutral?
For many instances in science, we deal with systems where charge neutrality is very important.
Perhaps a common example you might be familiar with is table salt, NaCl. Before forming salt, both sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl) are electrically neutral atoms. Then chlorine nabs an electron from a sodium because it is more energetically favorable for it to have an additional electron. You then have a Na+ cation and Cl- anion that combine into NaCl due to electrostatic attraction. Overall, NaCl is a neutral system (table salt doesn't shock you when you eat it... hopefully).
This property of electrical neutrality is also very important in the work that I do every day. I do computational research on crystals like NaCl where we calculate energies of a variety of sorts to understand the material. Part of calculating the total energy of a system for a crystal like NaCl involves the energy contribution that arises from Coulombic forces between every combination of Na+ and Cl- anion. This would mean figuring this out for something like 1023 ions (which is a lot). We do something a little more clever. NaCl is a crystal, which means it has a periodic (i.e. repeating) structure, so we only need to consider a unit cell, or small portion that can reproduce the entire crystal structure by translating it. But this means what we model is infinitely large materials. This is okay for bulk materials, since surface effects are small.
What is more worrying are those long range Coulombic forces. If we're not careful, we could end up with infinite energy! And that would be no good. This can be solved with a clever way of adding Coulombic forces (called Ewald summation) and a charge neutral unit cell.
But if many everyday things we are familiar with are electrically neutral, does this mean that the universe has to be electrically neutral?
Maybe.
It's actually still an open research question. What do you think would happen if the universe were just slightly positively charged overall? This is different from being ionized- that just means there are positively and negatively charged particles. But do these particles have to just balance each out? You can follow an interesting discussion here or a pretty recent article about how the universe could be slightly positively charged (the math gets a little hairy towards the end, but there luckily is more exposition overall).
Hope this helps!
Best,
But this is probably not a very satisfying answer. (I personally find answers based on definitions pretty bland.) Perhaps an interesting follow up question is...
Is the universe electrically neutral?
For many instances in science, we deal with systems where charge neutrality is very important.
Perhaps a common example you might be familiar with is table salt, NaCl. Before forming salt, both sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl) are electrically neutral atoms. Then chlorine nabs an electron from a sodium because it is more energetically favorable for it to have an additional electron. You then have a Na+ cation and Cl- anion that combine into NaCl due to electrostatic attraction. Overall, NaCl is a neutral system (table salt doesn't shock you when you eat it... hopefully).
This property of electrical neutrality is also very important in the work that I do every day. I do computational research on crystals like NaCl where we calculate energies of a variety of sorts to understand the material. Part of calculating the total energy of a system for a crystal like NaCl involves the energy contribution that arises from Coulombic forces between every combination of Na+ and Cl- anion. This would mean figuring this out for something like 1023 ions (which is a lot). We do something a little more clever. NaCl is a crystal, which means it has a periodic (i.e. repeating) structure, so we only need to consider a unit cell, or small portion that can reproduce the entire crystal structure by translating it. But this means what we model is infinitely large materials. This is okay for bulk materials, since surface effects are small.
What is more worrying are those long range Coulombic forces. If we're not careful, we could end up with infinite energy! And that would be no good. This can be solved with a clever way of adding Coulombic forces (called Ewald summation) and a charge neutral unit cell.
But if many everyday things we are familiar with are electrically neutral, does this mean that the universe has to be electrically neutral?
Maybe.
It's actually still an open research question. What do you think would happen if the universe were just slightly positively charged overall? This is different from being ionized- that just means there are positively and negatively charged particles. But do these particles have to just balance each out? You can follow an interesting discussion here or a pretty recent article about how the universe could be slightly positively charged (the math gets a little hairy towards the end, but there luckily is more exposition overall).
Hope this helps!
Best,
Answered by
5
An atom is electrical neutral because the total net positive charge is equal to the total net negative charge i.e no of electron in an atom is equal to the no of protons and hence it is electrically neutral
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