Atom to the positively charged nucleus by the attraction created from opposite electric charges. If an atom has more or fewer electrons than its atomic number, then it becomes respectively negatively or positively charged as a whole; a charged atom is called an ion. Electrons have been known since the late 19th century, mostly thanks to J.J. Thomson; see history of subatomic physics for details. Protons have a positive charge and a mass 1,836 times that of the electron, at . The number of protons in an atom is called its atomic number. Ernest Rutherford (1919) observed that nitrogen under alpha-particle
Embedded atom model a simulation, the potential energy of an atom, formula_1, is given by where formula_3 is the distance between atoms formula_1 and formula_5, formula_6 is a pair-wise potential function, formula_7 is the contribution to the electron charge density from atom formula_5 of type formula_9 at the location of atom formula_1, and formula_11 is an embedding function that represents the energy required to place atom formula_1 of type formula_13 into the electron cloud. Since the electron cloud density is a summation over many atoms, usually limited by a cutoff radius, the EAM potential is a multibody potential. For a single element system