New answers tagged conductors
2
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Do conductors have bound charges?
The language at the outset is different from what is used in a chemistry of materials perspective. It also leaves a sense of sloppiness, throwing around terminologies and using somewhat circular ...
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Do conductors have bound charges?
In a metal the free charges counter external macroscopic fields. Therefore there is no polarisation of the bound, inner, electrons. For ultraviolet frequencies and beyond this is no longer true and ...
- 25.3k
2
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Accepted
Do conductors have bound charges?
You are correct. In a typical conductor, like a metal, the charges are all considered free charges. That includes both the mobile electrons and the immobile lattice protons.
The reason is, as you say, ...
- 103k
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Will the electrical potential difference between the Windward and Leeward sides of a mountain range generate electrical current?
It is possible that a current could develop in your cable, but it won't be a steady current like you'd want to charge a battery. Humans have actually built quite a lot of conductors that stick into ...
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Accepted
Visualization of resistance
What does a resistor do in an electrical circuit?
The resistance of a conductor limits the amount of current that can flow in the conductor for a given potential difference.
I have been told to ...
- 73.7k
0
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Visualization of resistance
As the other answer has pointed, there is not a direct analogy between the two situations but I would like to add that you can force-create an analogy between fluid flow in a pipe and current flow in ...
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Visualization of resistance
I have been told to think of water flowing in a pipe and which has a narrow part
I don't think the narrow pipe is a good analogy of a resistor.
In simple fluid dynamics the water in the narrow part ...
- 56.4k
0
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Charge besides conductor
Suppose the sphere has radius $R$ and we have a point charge $+q$ at distance $D$ from the sphere's center. Then the Induced charge distribution on the sphere's surface will give exactly the same ...
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Why does the graph of the electric potential of a conducting sphere look like this?
Graphs for kQ/r and $kQ/r^2$ are different.In textbooks it is not very easy to distinguished these graphs.We can put the positive and negative values of r and find that kQ/r will be positive for ...
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Charge besides conductor
If a positive charge is near (but not touching) the sphere it will not create a net charge on the sphere. It will only redistribute the existing charge on the sphere so that the negative charge (of ...
- 73.7k
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Charge besides conductor
The positive charge produces an electric field which if nothing happened on the adjacent conductor would pass through the conductor.
However the induced charges on the conductor also produce an ...
- 97.9k
1
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Accepted
How do conductors actually work in electrostatics?
There are different kinds of conductors. The common thing is charges are free to move around.
Metals are a common example. In a metal, some electrons do not stay in orbitals around individual atoms. ...
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Confusion regarding phase
Yes, your understanding of phase difference is correct: if the phase difference between two waves is positive, the former is leading and the latter is lagging. Let's closely examine what Griffiths is ...
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Why don't positively charged metal ions (in a wire) move but electrons do?
In a zero resistance DC power line electrons keep on moving without accelerating, because there is no electric field inside the wire.
In a zero resistance DC power line ions keep on staying still ...
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-1
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Charge conservation in ohmic material - Apparent paradox
As I understand it, the questioner's claim is that the equation
$\frac{\partial Q}{\partial t}+\frac{\sigma}{\epsilon_0}Q=0$ is derived
only from the standard Maxwell equations.
As a result, $Q$ is ...
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Why don't positively charged metal ions (in a wire) move but electrons do?
The question is why the ions are localised and form a lattice, unlike the electrons. The reason is that they are typically 10000-100000 times heavier than electrons. Therefore they have very small, ...
- 25.3k
2
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Accepted
Why don't positively charged metal ions (in a wire) move but electrons do?
To answer this question, it is necessary to understand
the structure of the metal at the atomic scale. A very simple way to see it is that the positively charged nuclei sit at fixed points in a ...
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2
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Why don't positively charged metal ions (in a wire) move but electrons do?
It’s because the ions aren’t delocalized like the electrons are.
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4
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Accepted
Charge conservation in ohmic material - Apparent paradox
Differential problems are defined in a domain and require boundary conditions, and the solution to be "regular enough" for the differential equations to hold.
If you're dealing with a body ...
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