Properties of Nucleons

We use the word nucleon when we want to refer to either a proton or a neutron without making a distinction between them. Since they have about the same mass, protons and neutrons act as if they were identical particles that differ only in their electric charge.

The proton carries a charge of +1 (in units of the electron charge) and the neutron is neutral (zero charge).

This page is under development.

Protons and neutrons are themselves made up of quarks as this schematic picture indicates. In the quark model, the only difference between a proton and a neutron is that an up quark has been replaced with a down quark.

The little spring in the drawing is used to indicate that the quarks inside a nucleon are held together by a force we call gluon exchange.

Size of Nucleons

A nucleon is about 1.6 fm in diameter (fm stands for femto meter, where femto is the prefix meaning 10^-15, sometimes written as 10^{-15} when superscripts are not available in text), which you might write as 0.0000000000000016 m. That is pretty small, but not much smaller than a nucleus. That is because the force that holds the nucleus together is very short range, so the protons and neutrons in a nucleus are packed together so they are almost touching each other.

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