I am in class 12th and was reading about electrode potential in electrochemistry. While explaining it, my teacher said that due to the concentration of electrons in the anode and positive ions in the electrolyte, there is a separation of charge, and a potential difference is created, which is known as the electrode potential.
How? My understanding of the potential difference between two points is that it is the work done in moving a unit positive charge from one place to another.
Your understanding of potential difference is essentially correct.
What your teacher should have told you is the potential difference between the battery terminals is the result of the battery doing electrochemical work in moving electrons from one end of the battery to the other end.
In effect, the battery converts chemical potential energy to electrical potential energy. This makes the battery ready to supply, and continue to supply, electrical current to a load when connected to the terminals. The electrical potential energy is then converted to other energy forms (heat, light, work, etc.)
Hope this helps.
So it is exactly like you see it, if you wanted to move a positive charge to the anode (+pole9 you would have to do work. Potential difference is is not work done, but work needed.
A potential difference between two points expresses how strongly charges "want" to move from one point to the other. More precisely, a point of larger repulsion will be associated with a higher potential, whereas a point of smaller repulsion or larger attraction has a lower potential.
And when charges are separated, meaning positive charges are concentrated at one point and negative charges at another point, then the negative ones feel a strong repulsion away from their current position and a strong attraction towards the other point.
Hence, a potential difference between the points. You are right, that such potential difference does correspond to the work that the charge can do, precisely because it will gain the potential energy difference as kinetic energy if released (if allowed to move to the other point), an amount that can then be transfered as work when impacting something else. Equivalently, in order to move a charge away from a point of no repulsion to a point of high repulsion (so moving it to a higher potential), you must supply as work this exact potential energy difference.
A gravitational example might be more intuitive as an analogy: A ball on a shelf will not want to move to another point on the shelf, since the gravitational potential is the same everywhere on the shelf (a difference of zero). But the ball will immediately fall, if allowed, downwards, since lower points are at a lower gravitational potential (the difference is larger). As it falls, all the released potential energy is converted into kinetic energy (speed increases) which can be transferred as work when impacting so thing - to move the ball back up to the shelf, you will have to supply, as work, this exact same energy amount once more.
There are various ways to introduce the concept of potential (and thus potential difference). In the way your teacher seems to be introducing it, he's using the word 'potential' because he's already seen that when you move a positive charge away from a negative charge, that particular configuration, if you release it, comes crashing back together. Thus, there was 'potential' there for it to become, or do something else.
Now, to the concept of work: work (for a particular force) is just $W = \int \vec{F} \cdot d\vec{s}$ or $\vec{F} \cdot \vec{\ell}$ - now, when I do work on a pencil or a book, to move it to a different location on the table, and release it, did it do anything? In this case, no, all you did was move it. But with charges, you can do work, and then let go, and things move around. Before you 'let go' you define something called 'potential' or 'potential energy' - here, I'm defining as you are, potential associated with the input energy by me, the agent. Another way to introduce potential (or potential energy) is more mathematical. You'll learn that the electric field (or electric force) is conservative - and thus you can define a function, with a minus sign (it will also work without the minus sign...but with the minus sign as is done in physics) $- \int_a^x \vec{F} \cdot d\vec{s}$
This is just a function $f(x)$ like you see in math class - why not? you can define any function you want $3x$, $x^2$, whatever. The reason that this function is useful is because of the work-kinetic energy theorem. Both ways are valid introductions/teachings of the topic
