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TEAL Electricity & Magnetism
 
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SECTION : Forces and Torques on Dipoles    

  
SUBJECT: Molecules  
 
DESCRIPTION:

We show the interaction of four charges of equal mass. Two of the charges are positively charged and two of the charges are negatively charged, and all have the same magnitude of charge. The particles interact via the Coulomb force. We also introduce a quantum-mechanical "Pauli" force, which is always repulsive and becomes very important at small distances, but is negligible at large distances. This critical distance is about the radius of the spheres shown in the animation. This "Pauli" force is quantum mechanical in origin, and keeps the charges from collapsing into a point (i.e., it keeps a negative particle and a positive particle from sitting exactly on top of one another). Additionally, the motion of the particles is damped by a term proportional to their velocity, allowing them to "settle down" into stable (or meta-stable) states.

When these charges are allowed to evolve from the initial state, the first thing that happens (very quickly) is that the charges pair off into dipoles. This is a rapid process because the Coulomb attraction between unbalanced charges is very large. This process is called "ionic binding", and is responsible for the intermolecular forces in ordinary table salt, NaCl. After the dipoles form, there is still an interaction between neighboring dipoles, but this is a much weaker interaction because the electric field of the dipoles falls off much faster than that of a single charge. This is because the net charge of the dipole is zero.

Although in principle the dipole-dipole interaction can be either repulsive or attractive, in practice there is a torque that rotates the dipoles so that the dipole-dipole force is attractive. This dipole-dipole attraction eventually brings the two dipoles together in a bound state. The force of attraction between two dipoles is termed a "van der Waals" force, and is responsible for the intermolecular forces that bind the molecules of some substances into a solid.

 

 

   
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