Chemistry of Life: General Chemistry

carbonic acid

...Carbonic acid is the chemical compound with the chemical formula H2CO3 (equivalently OC(OH)2). It is also a name sometimes given to solutions of carbon dioxide in water (carbonated water), because such solutions contain small amounts of H2CO3. In physiology, carbonic acid is described as volatile acid or respiratory acid, because it is the only acid excreted as a gas by the lungs.[1] Carbonic acid, which is a weak acid, forms two kinds of salts, the carbonates and the bicarbonates. In geology, carbonic acid causes limestone to dissolve producing calcium bicarbonate which leads to many limestone features such as stalactites and stalagmites .

Bases

A base is a compound that dissociates in water and yields hydroxyl ions (OH-). Bases are Proton acceptors.

Quark

A quark (/ˈkwɔrk/ or /ˈkwɑrk/) is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei.[1] Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly observed or found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, such as baryons (of which protons and neutrons are examples), and mesons.[2][3] For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of the hadrons themselves. There are six types of quarks, known as flavors: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top.[4] Up and down quarks have the lowest masses of all quarks. The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through a process of particle decay: the transformation from a higher mass state to a lower mass state. Because of this, up and down quarks are generally stable and the most common in the universe, whereas strange, charm, bottom, and top quarks can only be produced in high energy collisions (such as those involving cosmic rays and in particle accelerators). Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, color charge and spin. Quarks are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction), as well as the only known particles whose electric charges are not integer multiples of the elementary charge. For every quark flavor there is a corresponding type of antiparticle, known as an antiquark, that differs from the quark only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign. The quark model was independently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964.[5] Quarks were introduced as parts of an ordering scheme for hadrons, and there was little evidence for their physical existence until deep inelastic scattering experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1968.[6][7] Accelerator experiments have provided evidence for all six flavors. The top quark was the last to be discovered at Fermilab in 1995.[5]

pH and composition of carbonic acid solutions

At a given temperature, the composition of a pure carbonic acid solution (or of a pure CO2 solution) is completely determined by the partial pressure \scriptstyle p_{CO_2} of carbon dioxide above the solution. To calculate this composition, account must be taken of the above equilibria between the three different carbonate forms (H2CO3, HCO3− and CO32−) as well as of the hydration equilibrium between dissolved CO2 and H2CO3 with constant \scriptstyle K_h=\frac{[H_2CO_3]}{[CO_2]} (see above) and of the following equilibrium between the dissolved CO2 and the gaseous CO2 above the solution: CO2(gas) is in equilibrium with CO2(dissolved) with \scriptstyle \frac{[CO_2]}{p_{CO_2}}=\frac{1}{k_\mathrm{H}} where kH=29.76 atm/(mol/L) at 25 °C (Henry constant) The corresponding equilibrium equations together with the \scriptstyle[H^+][OH^-]=10^{-14} relation and the charge neutrality condition \scriptstyle[H^+]=[OH^-]+[HCO_3^-]+2[CO_3^{2-}] result in six equations for the six unknowns [CO2], [H2CO3], [H+], [OH−], [HCO3−] and [CO32−], showing that the composition of the solution is fully determined by \scriptstyle p_{CO_2}. The equation obtained for [H+] is a cubic whose numerical solution yields the following values for the pH and the different species concentrations:

Hadron

In particle physics, a hadron Listeni/ˈhædrɒn/ (Greek: ἁδρός, hadrós, "stout, thick") is a composite particle made of quarks held together by the strong force (in a similar way as molecules are held together by the electromagnetic force). Hadrons are categorized into two families: baryons (such as protons and neutrons, made of three quarks) and mesons (such as pions, made of one quark and one antiquark). A tetraquark state (an exotic meson), named the Z(4430)- was discovered in 2014 by the LHCb collaboration.[1] Other types of exotic hadrons may exist, such as pentaquarks (exotic baryons), but no current evidence conclusively suggests their existence.[2][3] Of the hadrons, protons are stable, and neutrons bound within atomic nuclei are stable, whereas other hadrons are unstable under ordinary conditions; free neutrons decay with a half life of about 880 seconds. Experimentally, hadron physics is studied by colliding protons or nuclei of heavy elements such as lead, and detecting the debris in the produced particle showers.

Thinking in Pictures

Reaction between Hydrochloric acid (proton donor) and ammonia (proton acceptor) Pp. 6

Proton

The proton is a subatomic particle, symbol p or p+, with a positive electric charge of 1 elementary charge and mass slightly less than that of a neutron. Protons and neutrons, each with mass approximately one atomic mass unit, are collectively referred to as "nucleons". One or more protons are present in the nucleus of an atom. The number of protons in the nucleus is referred to as its atomic number. Since each element has a unique number of protons, each element has its own unique atomic number. The name proton was given to the hydrogen nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1920, because in previous years he had discovered that the hydrogen nucleus (known to be the lightest nucleus) could be extracted from the nuclei of nitrogen by collision, and was thus a candidate to be a fundamental particle and building block of nitrogen, and all other heavier atomic nuclei. In the modern Standard Model of particle physics, the proton is a hadron, and like the neutron, the other nucleon (particle present in atomic nuclei), is composed of three quarks. Prior to that model becoming a consensus in the physics community, the proton was considered a fundamental particle. In the modern view, a proton is composed of three valence quarks: two up quarks and one down quark. The rest masses of the quarks are thought to contribute only about 1% of the proton's mass. The remainder of the proton mass is due to the kinetic energy of the quarks and to the energy of the gluon fields that bind the quarks together. Because the proton is not a fundamental particle, it possesses a physical size—although this is not perfectly well-defined since the surface of a proton is somewhat fuzzy, due to being defined by the influence of forces that do not come to an abrupt end. The proton is about 0.84-0.87 fm in radius.[2] The free proton (a proton not bound to nucleons or electrons) is a stable particle that has not been observed to break down spontaneously to other particles. Free protons are found naturally in a number of situations in which energies or temperatures are high enough to separate them from electrons, for which they have some affinity. Free protons exist in plasmas in which temperatures are too high to allow them to combine with electrons. Free protons of high energy and velocity make up 90% of cosmic rays, which propagate in vacuum for interstellar distances. Free protons are emitted directly from atomic nuclei in some rare types of radioactive decay. Protons also result (along with electrons and antineutrinos) from the radioactive decay of free neutrons, which are unstable. At sufficiently low temperatures, free protons will bind to electrons. However, the character of such bound protons does not change, and they remain protons. A fast proton moving through matter will slow by interactions with electrons and nuclei, until it is captured by the electron cloud of an atom. The result is a protonated atom, which is a chemical compound of hydrogen. In vacuum, when free electrons are present, a sufficiently slow proton may pick up a single free electron, becoming a neutral hydrogen atom, which is chemically a free radical. Such "free hydrogen atoms" tend to react chemically with many other types of atoms at sufficiently low energies. When free hydrogen atoms react with each other, they form neutral hydrogen molecules (H2), which are the most common molecular component of molecular clouds in interstellar space. Such molecules of hydrogen on Earth may then serve (among many other uses) as a convenient source of protons for accelerators (as used in proton therapy) and other hadron particle physics experiments that require protons to accelerate, with the most powerful and noted example being the Large Hadron Collider.

Acids

These are substances that dissociate in water to produce hydrogen ions (H+0. A hydrogen ion is a proton. Acids are proton donors

pH

This is a numerical scale used to measure the relative strengths of acids and bases. a pH of 7 is neutral. a pH less than 7 is acidic. a pH more than 7 is basic.