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MIT Physics 8.02 - Electricity & Magnetism
 
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SECTION : Electrostatics  

  
SUBJECT: Charges Interacting Inside a Pentagon-shaped Box  

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:

In this simulation, ten positively charged particles interact in two dimensions inside a pentagon-shaped box via the classical Coulomb force and the quantum mechanical Pauli force. The mutual repulsion felt by the charges compels them to maximize the distance between each other. In this case, maximal separation puts them at the corners of the pentagon and at the halfway points along the sides that connect them.

 

 

 

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