Answer:
|F| = 2.09 × 10⁻⁸ assuming that the two ions are point charges.
Explanation:
What's the charge on each ion?
The symbol here stands for fundamental charge. Each electron carries a negative fundamental charge of -e. Each proton carry a positive fundamental charge of +e.
Molecules and atoms are neutral. They contain an equal number of electrons and protons. Remove one electron from a molecule or atom, and that particle will end up with more protons (which are positive) than electrons. That particle will carry a positive charge of +e become an ion (a cation to be precise.) Remove another electron and the ion will carry a charge of +2e.
For each ion .
What's the size of the electrostatic force between the two ions?
Consider Coulomb's Law for the electrostatic force between two point charges:
,
where
is Coulomb's constant,
and
are the charge on the two point charges, and
is the separation between the two charges.
Make sure that all values are in SI units. Assume that the two ions are small enough that they act like point charges:
.
The value of is negative, meaning that the two charges will repel each other because they are both positive. The question is asking for the magnitude of this force. Thus drop the sign in front of
to obtain
, which is the magnitude of
.