An Explanation on the Types of Charge

Atoms are the fundamental units of matter, which have a compact nucleus made up of neutral neutrons and positively charged protons. Despite being much smaller and lighter than protons, electrons are negatively charged and surround the nucleus. In terms of the total charge of the atom, an equal number of protons and electrons cancel each other out. Because neutrons are neutral (that is, they are neither positively nor negatively charged), their number has no bearing on the total charge.

The attraction between protons and electrons helps to keep the atom together, although an uneven amount of protons and electrons is possible. The atom is said to be charged in this instance. The atom has a net positive charge if the number of protons is greater than the number of electrons and a net negative charge if the number of electrons is greater than the number of protons. This is also how larger objects, which are composed of those charged atoms, get charged. A positive charge indicates that an object has lost some electrons and currently has more protons than electrons.

What Is An Electric Charge?

An electric charge is a basic physical feature that causes objects to become attracted to or repelled from one another. The coulomb is the basic unit of charge (C). Positive charge and negative charge are the two types of charges.

Electricity and magnetism are created by the movement or flow of charged particles. Electric current is, in fact, a moving stream of electric charge. The primary design for electric generators is to induce charge movement by the relative movement of a magnet and a coil of wire. 

According to the law of conservation of charge, an isolated system’s net charge will always remain constant. The overall quantity of electric charge in a system does not change over time, according to the principle of conservation of charge. Charged particles can be produced at the subatomic level, but only in pairs with an equal positive and negative charge, ensuring that the overall amount of charge stays unchanged.

Types of Charge

There are basically two types of charges, as discussed below:

Negative Electric Charge

At the subatomic level, a negative charge is an electrical property of a particle. If an object contains an excess of electrons, it is negatively charged; otherwise, it is uncharged or positively charged. 

Positive Electric Charge

When the number of protons surpasses the number of electrons in an atom, a positive charge is formed. An atom holding a neutral charge can be made positive by adding protons. Removing electrons from a neutrally charged material can also produce a positive charge.

Examples of Electric Charge

After learning about the types of charges and the law of conservation of charge, let’s go through an example. 

When amber (a hard, translucent, petrified resin from extinct trees) was forcefully rubbed with a piece of fur, a force was created that caused the fur and the amber to be drawn to each other, according to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus (624–546 BCE). He also discovered that the rubbed amber not only attracted the fur, and the fur attracted the amber, but that they both had an effect on other (nonmetallic) items, even though they were not in contact with them.

When amber is rubbed with a piece of fur, it accumulates extra electrons, resulting in a negative charge. At the same time, the fur loses electrons and becomes positively charged. 

Charges can be separated when materials are rubbed together, especially if one material has a higher affinity for electrons than the other. Initially, both the amber and the cloth were neutral, having equal positive and negative charges. Only a small percentage of the charges are implicated, and only a few are depicted here. (b) Some negative charge is transferred to the amber when the cloth is rubbed together, leaving the cloth with a net positive charge. (c) The cloth and amber, as they have been separated, have net charges; however, the net value of both types of charges, positive and negative charges, will be equal.

The Atom’s Structure as A Source Of Charges

Once it was established that all matter was made up of particles known as atoms, it was shortly established that the constituents of the atom included both positively and negatively charged particles. However, the next question is about the physical properties of electrically charged particles.

The first particle found was a negatively charged one. J. J. Thomson, an English physicist, started researching what was then known as cathode rays in 1897. William Crookes, an English physicist, had demonstrated that these “rays” were negatively charged a few years ago, but his experiments were unable to reveal much more. (The fact that they had a negative electric charge proved without a shadow of a doubt that they were particles rather than rays.) Thomson made a pure beam of these particles and passed it through crossed electric and magnetic fields, adjusting the field strengths until the beam’s net deflection was zero. He was able to determine the particle’s charge-to-mass ratio using this experiment. This ratio revealed that the particle’s mass was substantially less than any other previously known particle; in fact, it was 1,837 times smaller. This particle was eventually given the name electron.

Because the atom is electrically neutral as a whole, the next step was to figure out how the positive and negative charges are dispersed within it. Thomson imagined his electrons as being embedded in a positively charged paste that was dispersed throughout the atom’s volume. However, in 1908, New Zealand scientist Ernest Rutherford demonstrated that the atom’s positive charges were contained within a tiny nucleus that took up only a fraction of the overall volume of the atom, but housed over 99 per cent of the atom’s mass.

He also demonstrated that the negatively charged electrons orbited about the nucleus indefinitely, generating an electrically charged cloud around it. Rutherford came to the conclusion that the nucleus was made up of small, heavy particles he called protons.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned that positive and negative charges are the only two types of charges. Like charges repel one another, dissimilar charges attract each other, and the force between charges reduces as the distance between them grows.

Protons carry the positive charge in nature, while electrons carry the negative charge. The electric charge of one electron is the same magnitude as the charge of one proton but has the opposite sign.