The Electric Field Why is it safe to sit in a car during a lightning storm? How does a lightning rod protect a building? How does electrocardiography work? © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

A model of the mechanism for electrostatic interactions A model for electric interactions, suggested by Michael Faraday, involves some sort of electric disturbance in the region surrounding a charged object. Physicists call this electric disturbance an electric field. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Gravitational field due to a single object with mass We find a mathematical description of the "strength" of Earth's gravitational field at a particular location that is independent of the test mass: © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Electric field due to a single point-like charged object We use a similar approach of test charges to construct a physical quantity for the "strength" of the electric field: © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Electric field due to a single point-like charged object © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Electric field due to a single point-like charged object We can interpret this field as follows: The E field vector at any location points away from the object creating the field if Q is positive, and toward the object creating the field if Q is negative. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Superposition principle When multiple charged objects are present, each object makes its own contribution to the E field. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Using the superposition principle © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

E field lines © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

E field lines E field lines point away from an area of positive charge and point toward an area of negative charge. Closer to the charged objects, the lines are closer together; the number of lines per unit area (the density of lines) is larger where the E field is stronger. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

E field lines © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Tip © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Determining the E field produced by given source charges © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Electric potential due to a single charged object © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Tip © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

The superposition principle and the V field due to multiple charges –where Q 1, Q 2, Q 3, … are the source charges (including their signs) creating the field and r 1, r 2, r 3, … are the distances between the source charges and the location where we are determining the V field. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Finding the electric potential energy when the V field is known If we know the electric potential at a specific location, we can rearrange the definition of the V field to determine the electric potential energy: © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Potential difference The value of the electric potential depends on the choice of zero level, so we often use the difference in electric potential between two points. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Particles in a potential difference A positively charged object accelerates from regions of higher electric potential toward regions of lower potential (like an object falling to lower elevation in Earth's gravitational field). A negatively charged particle tends to do the opposite, accelerating from regions of lower potential toward regions of higher potential. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Equipotential surfaces: Representing the V field The lines represent surfaces of constant electric potential V, called equipotential surfaces. The surfaces are spheres (they look like circles on a two-dimensional page). © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Equipotential surfaces and E field © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Contour maps: An analogy for equipotential surfaces © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Deriving a relation between the E field and ΔV We attach a small object with charge +q to the end of a very thin wooden stick and place the charged object and stick in the electric field produced by the plate. The only energy change is the system's electric potential energy, because the positively charged object moves farther away from the positively charged plate. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Deriving a relation between the E field and ΔV Applying the generalized work-energy equation, we get: Equivalently, the component of the E field along the line connecting two points on the x-axis is the negative change of the V field divided by the distance between those two points: © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Electric field of a charged conductor Free electrons in a conductor are quickly redistributed until equilibrium is reached, at which point the E field inside the conductor and parallel to its surface becomes zero. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Electric field outside a charged conductor © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Grounding Grounding discharges an object made of conducting material by connecting it to Earth. Electrons will move between and within the spheres until the V field on the surfaces of and within both spheres achieves the same value. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Uncharged conductor in an electric field: Shielding The free electrons inside the object become redistributed due to electric forces, until the E field within the conducting object is reduced to zero. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Uncharged conductor in an electric field: Shielding The interior is protected from the external field— an effect called shielding. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Dielectric materials in an electric field If an atom in a dielectric material resides in a region with an external electric field, the nucleus and the electrons are displaced slightly in opposite directions until the force that the field exerts on each of them is balanced by the force they exert on each other. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Polar water molecules in an external electric field Some molecules, such as water, are natural electric dipoles even when the external E field is zero. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

E field inside a dielectric A dielectric material cannot completely shield its interior from an external electric field, but it does decrease the field. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

E field inside a dielectric Physicists use a physical quantity to characterize the ability of dielectrics to decrease the E field: –The dielectric constant κ – © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Dielectric constants for different types of materials © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Electric force and dielectrics The force that object 1 exerts on object 2 is reduced by κ compared with the force it would exert in a vacuum. Inside the dielectric material, Coulomb's law is now written as: © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Salt dissolves in blood but not in air When salt is placed in water or blood: –Many more collisions occur between molecules than between molecules and air; these can break an ion free from the crystal. –Any ions that become separated do not exert nearly as strong as an attractive force on each other because of the dielectric effect. –The random kinetic energy of the liquid is sufficient to keep the sodium and chlorine ions from recombining, allowing the nervous system to use the freed sodium ions to transmit information. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Tip © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Capacitors A capacitor consists of two conducting surfaces separated by a nonconducting material. The role of a capacitor is to store electric potential energy. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Capacitors (Cont'd) © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Capacitors If we consider the capacitor plates to be large flat conductors, charge should be distributed evenly on the plates. –The magnitude of the E field between the plates relates to the potential difference from one plate to the other and the distance separating them –To double the E field, the charge on other plates has to double. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Capacitors The proportionality constant C in this equation is called the capacitance of the capacitor. The unit of capacitance is 1 coulomb/volt = 1 farad (in honor of Michael Faraday). © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Capacitance of a capacitor A capacitor with larger-surface-area plates should be able to maintain more charge separation because there is more room for the charge to spread out. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Capacitance of a capacitor A larger distance between the plates leads to a smaller- magnitude E field between the plates. Because the magnitude of this E field is proportional to the amount of electric charge on the plates, a larger plate separation leads to a smaller-magnitude electric charge on the plates. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Capacitance of a capacitor Material between the plates with a large dielectric constant becomes polarized by the electric field between the plates. Thus more charge moves onto capacitor plates that are separated by material of high dielectric constant. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Capacitance of a capacitor The capacitance of a particular capacitor should increase if the surface area A of the plates increases, decrease if the distance d between them is increased, and increase if the dielectric constant k of the material between them increases: © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Tip © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Body cells as capacitors Cells, including nerve cells, have capacitor-like properties. –The conducting "plates" are the fluids on either side of a moderately nonconducting cell membrane. –In this membrane, chemical processes cause ions to be "pumped" across the membrane. –As a result, the membrane's inner surface becomes slightly negatively charged, while the outer surface becomes slightly positively charged. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Energy of a charged capacitor To determine the electric potential energy in a charged capacitor, we start with an uncharged capacitor and then calculate the amount of work that must be done on the capacitor to move electrons from one plate to the other. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Energy of a charged capacitor The process of charging a capacitor is similar to stretching a spring: at the beginning, a smaller force is needed to stretch the spring by a certain amount compared to the much greater force needed when the spring is already stretched. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Energy density of electric field To have a measure of energy independent of the capacitor volume, we will use the physical quantity of energy density. –This energy density quantifies the electric potential energy stored in the electric field per cubic meter of volume. – © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Tip © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Tip © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Electrocardiography An electric charge separation occurs when muscle cells in the heart contract during the pumping process. As each muscle cell contracts, positive and negative charges separate. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Lightning When the E field in air or in some other material is very large, free electrons accelerate and quickly acquire enough kinetic energy to ionize atoms and molecules in their path when colliding with them. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Lightning rods Dielectric breakdown occurs between the cloud and the lightning rod. Drawing lightning to the rod and away from the building prevents damage to the building and its inhabitants. © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Summary © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Summary © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Summary © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.

Summary © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.