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If the electron is said to be a charge carrier, then could it lose its charge? It wouldn't remain an electron of course because the charge is one of its important properties. But am talking about the process of losing its charge .I'm feeling the answer is absolutely impossible, but I just want to know why?

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Electrons cannot lose their charge. It is not currently known to be made up of any other elementary particles, as discussed in the other postings.

What makes it impossible are the conservation laws of charge, energy, and lepton number

The one for charge would say that if it loses its charge something else has to appear with the same charge. That would be a decay process where, say, it decays into a particle without charge and some other particle with charge. One of those, without charge, could be the neutrino or photon or anything else pretty light, without charge. The other one has to have charge (and you also need to worry about weak charge, as weak interactions also have their conservation laws). But, and here is the real basic reason, there is NO charged particle lighter than the electron, and no charged lepton lighter either. Since energy and lepton number also need to be conserved that is impossible

That is why the electron is considered to be perfectly stable. It can not decay

An electron can interact with a photon or other particles, and in the process disappear as some other lepton with charge emerges. The additional energy needed would be supplied by the photon or other particle energy.

As for the conserved lepton number, only the electron, muon, tau and neutrino are leptons. The muon and taus have charge but are heavier than the electron (so they can decay to an electron and something else to balance the energy and momentum). That so why the electron can not decay to another charged lepton. The neutrinos are different for each of the three families of charged leptons. Why 3 is still not certain - that is a separate issue.

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Charge conservation is one answer - but I'd say there's another point here that's missed and that's that, without its charge, an electron would not be an electron anymore. (After all, charge conservation does not prevent you from imagining somehow "draining" or "siphoning off" the charge from the electron so as to put it in some kind of external holding reservoir instead of having it "disappear", like one does in a classic grade school electrostatics experiment where one "siphons" charge from a metal sphere by attaching a grounding rod. That would satisfy charge conservation yet despite that it's still not something we see happen and thus needs explanation as to why it can't happen.) The charge is an intrinsic property of what makes an electron what it is.

From the viewpoint of the standard model, what different kinds of particles in the Universe are determined by what kinds of quantum fields exist - one field for each particle type, since each particle is in effect created from vibration of the field. The properties of the particles are determined by, or you could say, identical to, those of their given field. To have a "charge free electron" as you imagine it, you'd need a quantum field that has all the same properties as the one for electrons (e.g. same mass and spin) but just without the charge to support such a particle even existing. The laws of the standard model do not have such a field and we have not seen one.

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Electrons have charge, and that's not going to change, as you said. There are interactions that involve the charge going one way and something else going another way.

One example would be reverse beta decay - Electron and a proton come in, neutron and neutrino go out (other particles will get involved, depending on the details). The neutrino carries the electron-number-count part of the electron and the charge went to cancelling the proton's charge. If you identify the part of the electron that you care about as the electron-number-count, then that part lost its association to a charge when it came to be carried by a neutrino.

But, as you said, it isn't the electron losing its charge so much as the electron being replaced by other particles with the same total properties.

Does this qualify?

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Empirically speaking electrons are never seen without carrying a charge. This was then reified inductively into a universal principle that electrons are always charged and with the charge e.

The word 'carrying' or 'bearing' here is an artifact of language. In physical theory all electrons are alike and so it's part of the identity of an electron to carry that charge. In a sense, it is that charge.

Essentially, this notion comes from the theory of atomism where a fundamental or elementary element of reality is seen as universal: all atoms of a particular type are identical.

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In condensed master physics electrons can behave as split into three quasi particles : spinons, holons and orbitons. I think this unusual behaviour comes close to what you loosely describe as an electron losing its charge. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinon

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If the electron is said to be a charge carrier

seems to be a little bit misleading. Electrons have the intrinsic property of electric charge, they are a charge. You can’t take away the charge from the electron, the electron is the charge. And as long as there are not found constituents of the electron it makes no sense to talk about a carrier property.

Our knowledge about the electrons electric properties are limited to the facts that

  • the charge-to-mass ratio is a constant number (Sir Joseph John Thomson in 1897)
  • the electric charge of the electron is a constant number (Robert Andrews Millikan in 1910)
  • and by this that the mass is a constant number.

Reading this carful someone can reply that the mass is growing with increasing velocity of the electron. So we have to say, that the charge-to-mass ratio is in reality a charge-to-rest mass ratio. Now you may ask, what is the charge-to-mass ratio for moving charges.

This question could be answered for example by high energy physicists. They accelerate bunches of electrons in the acceleration pipe. The beam divergence of a bundle of accelerated electrons could be a method to investigate the constancy or variance of the electrons charge. Are there researches about the constancy of the electrons charge on relativistic velocities I don’t know.

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No, electron itself is charge, if it loses charge, you are left with nothing.

Although you can destroy electron to other elementary particles which have no charge. This is what happens during positron and electron annihilation. As you said, yes in this process electron no longer exists. But charge is lost since photons have no charge.

Charges can be created or destroyed. But, you cannot create or destroy charge numbers. Charge numbers are conserved.

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