Author Topic: What happens if all the electrons from a lump of material are removed?  (Read 3388 times)

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Offline Ole

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Re: What happens if all the electrons from a lump of material are removed?
« Reply #25 on: August 24, 2023, 09:34:50 am »
Just what sort of energies would be needed to completely ionize any bulk material?
For Hydrogen we are talking 13.7eV (iirc) per Atom so about 1.3MJ/g or roughly 300 Times the energy density fo TNT.
And that is ignoring energy required to compress the protons to a sphere with a noninfinite radius.
« Last Edit: August 24, 2023, 09:39:39 am by Ole »
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Offline EPAIII

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Re: What happens if all the electrons from a lump of material are removed?
« Reply #26 on: August 25, 2023, 07:16:51 am »
Spelling is my curse. Thanks for the correction.

Edit: I just spent a half hour going down a mathematical rabbit hole that made me realize I should have said a "Graham's number" instead of a "googolplex". Read about that, if you dare. And if your head has still not exploded, there are "busy beaver" numbers. We're gonna need a bigger universe.



Some people have a googleplex too much time on their hands.

And if you google it you'll find it's googolplex, Googlepex is Google's headquarters...
« Last Edit: August 25, 2023, 07:51:10 am by EPAIII »
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Offline TimFox

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Re: What happens if all the electrons from a lump of material are removed?
« Reply #27 on: August 25, 2023, 01:48:44 pm »
Just what sort of energies would be needed to completely ionize any bulk material?
For Hydrogen we are talking 13.7eV (iirc) per Atom so about 1.3MJ/g or roughly 300 Times the energy density fo TNT.
And that is ignoring energy required to compress the protons to a sphere with a noninfinite radius.

The mnemonic I was taught:  the ionization energy of the hydrogen atom is 13.6 eV, same as the density of liquid mercury in g/cm3.
 

Online ejeffrey

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Re: What happens if all the electrons from a lump of material are removed?
« Reply #28 on: August 25, 2023, 03:35:05 pm »
Just what sort of energies would be needed to completely ionize any bulk material?
For Hydrogen we are talking 13.7eV (iirc) per Atom so about 1.3MJ/g or roughly 300 Times the energy density fo TNT.
And that is ignoring energy required to compress the protons to a sphere with a noninfinite radius.

Which is orders of magnitude higher than the ionization energy.

Also, the total ionization energy is quadratic in Z, so even light atoms like carbon and oxygen have ionization energy dozens of times higher than hydrogen.
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: What happens if all the electrons from a lump of material are removed?
« Reply #29 on: August 25, 2023, 03:53:04 pm »
The first ionization energy of carbon is 11.26 eV, but when you get down to the last drop K-shell electron, the required energy is, indeed, huge.
 

Online Alex Eisenhut

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Re: What happens if all the electrons from a lump of material are removed?
« Reply #30 on: August 26, 2023, 10:08:57 pm »
Well it's a sci-fi weapon, a disintegrator ray. In Niven's novels there's the "digger", that doesn't remove electrons but cancels their charge so the target violently flies apart. (What the weapon emitter is made of is anyone's guess). In one story they come up with a matching weapon that cancels the charge on the proton and they fire both beams in parallel at a planet's surface.
I think Niven described the result as "there will be a current" that looks like a 12 mile long bar of solid lightning.  :scared:
Funny stuff.

I wouldn't even know how to begin looking for how it would be physically possible to cancel the charge of a fundamental particle like the electron. The proton seems to be made of three quarks that are constantly flipping around and maybe a beam of weird particles can force a preferred configuration of a proton that would have more or less charge. Shrinking atoms or prying them apart, oh my.
Even more sci-fi fun are fictional non-nuclear super-materials that simply don't react to said beams. Cuz they're like made of gluons only or space-time distortions. Like a cosmic string.  :-DD
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