Thread: protons only

i was in my chemistry class when my evil genius came out.
i started thinking about the different possibilities of being able to strip a nucleus of it's protons, or being able to seperate the protons from the nuetrons.

only problem is, i've never heard of anyhitng like this ever happening, so i thought i'd ask around here.

is it possible to remove protons from the nucleus of an atom, and keep all three parts seperate?

Yes, well kind of.
The electrons and protons will do fine by them selves but the neutrons will decay.
Free Neutron Decay
The neutrons will decay into a proton and electron and one light fast anti-neutrino.
Yes that is real anti-matter but it goes zooming off at great speeds and hardly interacts with matter or anti-matter.

As a mater of fact it was neutron decay that lead to the theory of the existence of the anti-neutrino because without the anti-neutrino momentum was not conserved.

However, if you get a lot of neutrons together you can get a neutron star.

Yes. It's called Proton emission and it occurs during nuclear fission.

There is proton emission, but don't count on just artificially separating the protons and neutrons in a nucleus. You have the binding energy to contend with, which will definitely fight any effort to break up the nucleus, unless it's already unstable (as in the common case of U-235).

Side note: I see you listen to Mastodon. Leviathan is a good album.

thanks for that little bit on the neutrons, i always thought it was so easy to see the nuetrons as an anti-matter like particle. now i know why.