Why protons in nucleus don't repulse each other?

Answer 1

firstly a star for your question. a question that still has not been answered. im sure you will not find the answer anywhere for now but only explanation.

your question has not yet been answered and proven practically but only by theory. correct me if i am wrong.

as you know, like charges repel. this electric force gets stronger as the distance between like charged particals reduce.

this means that the force that keeps the nuclei together must be an even stronger force, aptly named, the strong force, or the strong nuclear force.

this means that the nucleus exerts a force. but where does this force come from. The strong nuclear force is created between nucleons by the exchange of particles called mesons. the distance has to be at least less than the diameter of a nucleon in order for this exchange to happen.
This exchange is like hitting a ping-pong ball or a tennis ball back and forth between two people at high speeds.

if the nucleons can get close to each other overcoming the repulsive force, then they would be exchanging mesons and they would stick together. the neutrons are uneffected by the protons because they remain unaffected by repulsive forces but do interact in meson exchange, thus helping the cause of holding the nucleus together. this is why neutrons are used to bombard the nucleus of an atom be cause they are not defleted by charged particles and hit directly at the nucleus. the contact between them initiates the meson exchange.

another theory is where quarks(a subatomic particle in an atom) comes in.

quarks contain charges and the closer they are to other quarks, the strong the force exerted by them. by closer, we mean at subatomic levels.

it has been noticed that quarks "behaved as free particles at infinitesimally small separations." and when these quarks were seperated, the forces just fell apart. so it is the forces exerted by the quarks that also helps in keeping the nucleus together.

the theory on quarks were discovered by David J. Gross, 63, of the University of California, Santa Barbara; H. David Politzer, 55, of California Institute of Technology; and Frank A. Wilczek, 53, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and won them the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Answer 2

The nucleons are bound together by a short-ranged attractive potential called the residual strong force. At distances smaller than 2.5 FM this force is much more powerful than the electrostatic force that causes positively charged protons to repel from each other that's why instead being positively charged protons are present together in nucleus.

Answer 3

Well, the long answer above isn't too bad, but it's not right in several fundamental respects. The first being that the force carrier for the Strong force is the gluon, rather than meson exchange. The strong force gets stronger at larger separations, until the potential energy it contains becomes enough to spontaneously create particle/anti-particle pairs. Even at small separations, the strong force is many times stronger than the electrostatic repulsion between the charged nucleons.

Also, this has been demonstrated experimentally, it is not just theory. The main experimental evidence comes from measurements of the proton structure function at the Hera ring in Hamburg.

Answer 4

Because the nucleus also contains neutrons, which help to balance the repulsion. The protons and neutrons are "glued" together by another force, the Strong Nuclear Force. It takes a huge amount of energy to overcome this force and rip the nucleus apart.

Answer 5

They do, but the attraction from the strong nuclear force overwhelms the electrostatic repulsion at short distances.

Answer 6

Your question is nice!


Because the Coulombian force vanishes for the distances less than one fermi= 10^-15 Metre

and the diameter of nucleus is within the the range of 10^-15 Metre.

Answer 7

cos the nucleus has neutral charge

Answer 8

The neutron has no charge!