Sections
Key Terms
Key Terms
- capacitor
- arrangement of objects that can store electrical energy by virtue of their geometry
- conductor
- material through which electric charge can easily move, such as metals
- Coulomb’s law
- describes the electrostatic force between charged objects, which is proportional to the charge on each object and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects
- dielectric
- electrically insulating material that becomes polarized in an electric field
- electric field
- defines the force per unit charge at all locations in space around a charge distribution
- electric potential
- the electric potential energy per unit charge
- electric potential energy
- the work that a charge can do by virtue of its position in an electric field
- electron
- subatomic particle that carries one indivisible unit of negative electric charge
- induction
- creating an unbalanced charge distribution in an object by moving a charged object toward it (but without touching)
- insulator
- material through which a charge does not move, such as rubber
- inverse-square law
- law that has the form of a ratio, with the denominator being the distance squared
- law of conservation of charge
- states that total charge is constant in any process
- polarization
- separation of charge induced by nearby excess charge
- proton
- subatomic particle that carries the same magnitude charge as the electron, but its charge is positive
- test charge
- positive electric charge whose with a charge magnitude so small that it does not significantly perturb any nearby charge distribution