A proton is made up, they say, by 2 up and 1 down quark, drowned in a sea of virual paricles:
when an electron is captured
this process thereby changes a nuclear proton to a neutron and simultaneously causes the emission of an electron neutrino.
p + e− → n + ν e
...and a neutron is made up by 2 down quarks and 1 up quarks
Can you clarify some aspects of this "process" which I couldn't find anywhere?
1) what happens to the electron? we know that it is an elementary particle, that means it has no internal structure and it can only be transformed into a photon when joined to a positron, is it first turned into energy? but there is no positron at hand in the proton. What are the steps that lead from 2u+1d+1e to 2d+1d+v?
2) is there any qualitative difference between the charge of a down quark and an electron? can electric charge emerge from two different types of particle or a d-quark is just an electron with restmass= energy =1.2356*10^20Hz/3?