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| What happens if all the electrons from a lump of material are removed? |
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| ejeffrey:
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on August 20, 2023, 04:50:57 pm ---To fully ionize the average atom in an average object, takes somewhere between a few keV and low MeV per atom. The corresponding energy put into the atom, gives it as much repulsion from others (mutual positive charge), or as much attraction to any electrons that can possibly be found nearby. These are fusion level energies, of course you need not just density but dwell time (together: confinement) to pull that off in quantity. The energy of a nuke corresponds to about 80MeV per fission event, of which there's a few kg of U or Pu in the core. A few dozen kg of regular matter, so prepared, therefore contains equivalent energy. --- End quote --- It's much worse than that actually. Or better, depending on how much you like giant explosions. But we are talking a mass extinction level event. It's not ionizing atoms or molecules in isolation that is the biggest effect, although it takes a lot of energy to ionize a mol of iron or whatnot. But the real energy is in the columb repulsion between all of the nucleii left over. which grows approximately quadratically, so it gets big *fast* for avogadro number of elementary charges. The self assembly energy of a sphere of uniform charge is U = 3/5 * Q^2/(4*pi*eps_0 * r) (this ignores the lumpiness of the individual atoms and their individual ionization energy). 12 grams of carbon (1 mol), which is a bit under 1 cm radius sphere of graphite and has 6 mol of elecrtons. With the electrons removed would have an electric self energy of 10^23 joules. That's a _million_ times more powerful than the Tsar Bomba, and approximately the energy from the Chicxulub impact that lead to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. A 75 kg ball of carbon (like a human) would have and explode with millions of times more energy than that. More than enough energy to boil the ocean and melt the earth. Somewhere around a ton of matter so de-electronified would have enough energy to literally vaporize the earth, exceeding it's own gravitational self energy and blasting it apart into interplanetary space. Obviously you couldn't actually create any of this. If you start with a neutrally charged object and start pulling electrons out, it gets harder and harder to do so as the net charge gets more positive. If you somehow find a way to avoid that and keep going, the coulomb repulsion would exceed the inter-atomic binding energy and the object would just explode. Roughly speaking this would happen when the energy above were similar to conventional chemical reactions. If you somehow confined it against this tendency to explode, the resulting electric field would tear apart any matter nearby and pull away it's electrons to balance the charge. If you somehow held it together and kept all other matter away, eventually I guess it would start causing pair production, capturing the electrons and radiating the positrons. |
| T3sl4co1l:
I think I once pondered the energy of, say, a softball of--- oh, no maybe it was a pound of electrons, something like that -- in isolation. Basically the same problem. I don't remember the scale of the setup anymore (and I can't look it up, it was on a long-defunct forum; although maybe it's archived somewhere, hm..), but something like that, pretty much. You would indeed need one hell of a trap to contain such a beast; and I have no idea how you'd assemble it, you can't just boil off electrons (..maybe an ever-increasing spectrum of hard gamma rays??); maybe it would be easier to assemble protons (or electrons as the case may be) rather than stripping something. Needless to say, utterly unimaginable magnet energy is required to construct such a trap; far more energy than contained in the trapped particles themselves. Electric field too (if it's a cross-field trap; I forget what kinds would be likely here). The pair production limit is, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwinger_effect and presumably further particles at ever higher field strengths, but you're smashing some serious laser power by then (we haven't even begun to approach this limit yet, let alone further limits). Tim |
| Infraviolet:
I'm fairly sure the energy required to strip all the electrons off atoms in a material will already be more than enough to have heated the material enough for it to boil or sublimate. And I don't think there is any way energy could be supplied to a material to liberate electrons which wouldn't also result in heating of the material. Though once liberated it is likely you'd be able to say that the electrons and atoms would each have very different "temperatures". |
| coppercone2:
I suspect one day in the distant future maintaining electron free materials will be something of a interstellar effort akin to the LHC. God knows what kind of things can happen with such a material. Would you be surprised if this was the kind of stuff you needed for processes that make say exotic matter? can a black hole be used to power such a device? The path of light is not affected by the presence of electric or magnetic field. However, in quantum electrodynamics, nonlinear terms appear in the effective action from the vacuum polarization effect. Then the path of light can be bent when the light passes around a strong electric or magnetic field. Does the light bend equally with frequency? Can it be used to make a gamma ray separator (like a prism?) |
| EPAIII:
Some people have a googleplex too much time on their hands. |
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