Electric Charges and Fields Vocabulary

Flashcards for vocabulary review based on lecture notes on electric charges and fields.

Electrostatics

The study of forces, fields, and potentials arising from static charges.

Electric Charge

A fundamental property of matter that can be positive or negative and is responsible for electric forces.

Electrified

The state of a body that has acquired an electric charge.

Polarity of Charge

The property which differentiates the two kinds of charges.

Conductors

Substances that readily allow the passage of electricity through them due to free electric charges.

Insulators

Substances that offer high resistance to the passage of electricity through them.

Point Charges

Charged bodies whose sizes are very small compared to the distances between them.

Additivity of Charges

The total charge of a system is obtained by adding algebraically all the individual charges.

Conservation of Charge

The total charge of an isolated system is always conserved; charges may get redistributed but not created or destroyed.

Quantisation of Charge

All free charges are integral multiples of a basic unit of charge denoted by e, where q = ne.

Coulomb (C)

The SI unit of charge, defined in terms of electric current.

Coulomb's Law

The magnitude of the force (F) between two point charges is product of the magnitude of the two charges and varied inversely as the square of the distance between the charges.

Permittivity of Free Space

Denoted by 0, the constant appearing in Coulomb's law, representing the ability of a vacuum to permit electric fields.

Electric Field

The electric force per unit charge experienced by a test charge at a given point.

Source Charge

The charge that produces an electric field.

Test Charge

A charge used to test the effect of a source charge.

Electric Field Lines

Pictorial representation of the electric field around a configuration of charges; tangent to the line at each point is in the direction of the net field.

Electric Flux

The measure of the number of electric field lines passing through a given area.

Electric Dipole

A pair of equal and opposite point charges q and –q, separated by a distance 2a.

Dipole Moment

A vector quantity defined as the product of the charge and the separation between the charges, pointing from the negative to the positive charge.

Polar Molecules

Molecules in which the centers of negative charges and of positive charges do not coincide and have a permanent eclectic dipole moment.

Linear Charge Density

Charge per unit length, denoted by λ.

Surface Charge Density

Charge per unit area, denoted by σ.

Volume Charge Density

Charge per unit volume, denoted by ρ.

Gaussian Surface

An imaginary closed surface used to apply Gauss's law.

Gauss's Law

The electric flux through a closed surface is equal to the total charge enclosed by the surface divided by the permittivity of free space.