Electric Force
--Asaxon7 (talk) 00:48, 18 November 2015 (EST) Claimed by Alayna Saxon
This page contains information on the electric force on a point charge. Electric force is created by an external Electric Field.
The Coulomb Force Law
The formula for the magnitude of the electric force between two point charges is:
[math]\displaystyle{ |\vec F|=\frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon_0 } \frac{|{q}_{1}{q}_{2}|}{r^2} }[/math]
where [math]\displaystyle{ {q}_{1} }[/math] and [math]\displaystyle{ {q}_{2} }[/math] are the magnitudes of charge of point 1 and point 2 and [math]\displaystyle{ r }[/math] is the distance between the two point charges. The units for electric force are in Newtons.
Direction of Electric Force
The electric force is along a straight line between the two point charges in the observed system. If the point charges have the same sign (i.e. both are either positively or negatively charged), then the charges repel each other. If the signs of the point charges are different (i.e. one is positively charged and one is negatively charged), then the point charges are attracted to each other.
Derivations of Electric Force
The electric force on a particle can also be written as:
[math]\displaystyle{ \vec F=q\vec E }[/math]
where [math]\displaystyle{ q }[/math] is the charge of the particle and [math]\displaystyle{ \vec E }[/math] is the external electric field.
This formula can be derived from [math]\displaystyle{ |\vec F|=\frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon_0 } \frac{|{q}_{1}{q}_{2}|}{r^2} }[/math], the electric force between two point charges. The magnitude of the electric field created by a point charge is [math]\displaystyle{ |\vec E|=\frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon_0 } \frac{|q|}{r^2} }[/math], where [math]\displaystyle{ q }[/math] is the magnitude of the charge of the particle and [math]\displaystyle{ r }[/math] is the distance between the observation location and the point charge. Therefore, the magnitude of electric force between point charge 1 and point charge 2 can be written as:
[math]\displaystyle{ |\vec F|=\frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon_0 } \frac{|{q}_{1}{q}_{2}|}{r^2}=|{q}_{2}|\frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon_0 } \frac{|{q}_{1}|}{r^2}=|{q}_{2}||\vec{E}_{1}| }[/math]
Examples
Be sure to show all steps in your solution and include diagrams whenever possible
Simple
Middling
Difficult
Connectedness
- How is this topic connected to something that you are interested in?
- How is it connected to your major?
- Is there an interesting industrial application?
History
Put this idea in historical context. Give the reader the Who, What, When, Where, and Why.
See also
Are there related topics or categories in this wiki resource for the curious reader to explore? How does this topic fit into that context?
Further reading
Books, Articles or other print media on this topic
External links
Internet resources on this topic
References
This section contains the the references you used while writing this page