Is electric potential energy responsible for energy release in nuclear fission and nuclear potential energy in fusion? What if elec. force not exist?It was my doubt and I thought it may be electric potential energy which is responsible for energy release in nuclear fission and by bombarding neutron we only provide energy to nucleons to cross equilibrium point (Felectric = Fnuclear) then it is spontaneous separated because of excess electric force, energy stored in electric field is released when it separates. Is it true? If yes then with this approach please explain why in lighter elements energy supplied is more than energy released in case of fission?

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Semaj Stark · Accepted Answer

Roughly speaking, the strong nuclear force is always attractive. (This is not 100% precise, but good enough for the present purposes.) Therefore if it were not for electrical repulsion, there could never be a net release of energy in fission. The number of electrical interactions scales like the square of the number of protons, so the role of electrical interactions is negligible in light nuclei but much more important in heavy ones.When fission does occur, which is normally only in heavy nuclei, the energy released is the sum of two types of energy: electrical and strong nuclear. Neither is negligible.The way people in the field conceptualize this is in terms of a deformation parameter   β that measures the distortion of the nucleus&#039;s shape away from a sphere. At large deformations, you get scission and fission. One can approximate the behavior using the Schrodinger equation, with   β behaving like a coordinate and some potential   V  (  β  ). The potential has a local minimum at a small but usually nonzero value of   β. There may be a second minimum at a large deformation; this is referred to as a fission isomer (in the actinides) or a superdeformed state (in lighter nuclei). The second minimum, if it exists, is separated from the first by a barrier. Finally we have a barrier that stands in the way of fission. For spontaneous fission, the nucleus can only get out through the barrier(s) by quantum mechanical tunneling. Even in the case of neutron-induced fission, tunneling may be necessary.This potential   V is the sum of nuclear and electrical terms. It is true, as you suggest, that   V is purely electrical when we get far beyond scission, but this doesn&#039;t mean that the energy released, relative to the initial state, is purely electrical.The answer by anna v is almost pure gibberish.

Eve Dunn · Accepted Answer

Electric fields and electric potentials belong in the realm of classical physics. In fission and fusion one is in the quantum mechanical realm and the special relativity realm, where electric and magnetic potentials are used to determine the wavefunctions of the involved particles and are irrelevant to the energy balances.In special relativity it is the four vectors that are important, and the invariant mass of the nuclei and the nucleons that compose the nuclei. Both fusion and fission happen because there is a mass difference between the sum of the nucleon invariant masses and the invariant mass of the nucleus, summarized in the nuclear binding energy curve. .The charges and magnetic moments are small corrections to the main contributing interaction, the strong nuclear interaction, a spill over or the QCD strong interaction among elementary particles(quarks and gluons).

Is electric potential energy responsible for energy release in nuclear fission and nuclear potential

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