Guided Tour | Vector Fields | Electrostatics | Magnetostatics | Faraday's Law | Light | Course Notes | Resources
MIT Physics 8.02 - Electricity & Magnetism
 
parenthesis

SECTION : Electrostatics  

  
SUBJECT: The Capacitor  

NOTE: You must be connected to the Internet the first time you view this simulation, at which point the codebase for all the simulations will be downloaded to your computer. This process make take a few minutes, as the codebase is roughly 9MB in size. Subsequent viewings of the applets will run from your local copy.

 
DESCRIPTION:

This simulation illustrates the interaction of charged particles inside the two plates of a capacitor. Each plate contains twelve charges interacting via the Coulomb and Pauli forces, where one plate contains positive charges and the other contains negative charges. Because of their mutual repulsion, the particles in each plate are compelled to maximize the distance between one another, and thus spread themselves evenly around the outer edge of their enclosure. However, the particles in one plate are attracted to the particles in the other, so they attempt to minimize the distance between themselves and their oppositely charged correspondants. Thus, they distribute themselves along the surface of their bounding box closest to the other plate.

 

 

 

   
Start Simulation
(Note: you must have Java™ J2SE v1.4+ JRE installed)