Neutron has charges

From:
www.sciencedaily.com...

Using precise data recently gathered at three different laboratories and some new theoretical tools, Gerald A. Miller, a UW physics professor, has found that the neutron has a negative charge both in its inner core and its outer edge, with a positive charge sandwiched in between to make the particle electrically neutral.

Although it was known that neutron had charges that balance out, but this discovery about its distribution is new.

I know they've been searching for an electric dipole moment in the neutron for a long long time. This is cool stuff, if a bit geeky.

Did you know that outside a nucleus, a lone neutron will destabilize, emit an electron and become a proton?

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
Did you know that outside a nucleus, a lone neutron will destabilize, emit an electron and become a proton?

So a neutron is "compressed" hydrogen? Hm... Would emitting the electron be exothermic or endothermic?

reply to post by Johnmike


The electron comes off moving pretty fast, IIRC about 750kEv of kinetic energy. So it's clipping.

This is why you find hydrogen inclusions in irradiated metals. The neutrons that don't end up being captured inside the metal will, with a halflife of about 885 seconds, decay into a hydrogen.

In plutonium, that ends up causing little crystalline defects and making the pit swell ever so minutely.

According to my theory of matter (which I just have not been motivated to write down). Both neutrons and protons are bipolar. The nucleus of an atom is actually a ring formed by the opposing poles sticking to each other forming a chain.

By the way a neutron brakes up into a proton, electron and a neutrieno.

Yeah, you just can't do much of anything with a neutrino.

OTOH, the beta emission (the electron) is characteristic of neutron radiation.

You either get betas from free neutrons decaying, or you get them a lot of times if you get nuclear capture of the neutron. The neutron isn't very stable inside a lot of light nuclei that capture it, and will decay there with a longer time scale, emitting a beta and bumping the nucleus up one on the atomic number scale.

So you get primary betas up front and secondary ones later.

Thus can you tell, say, if a secret hush-a-boom fusion bomb went off somewhere.

Are these different charges the quarks that make up the nucleons?

The charges being -1/3 at the centre and outer edge and +2/3 in between?
Would the proton have a similar configuration +2/3. -1/3, +2/3 with the negative charge between two positive charges?



[edit on 18-9-2007 by squiz]

And I came on this thread wondering what crime had been committed to result in charges. Sometimes the header gets me.

Seriously, this is cool. Geeky, but cool.