Name: Basic Properties of Electric Charge
Uploaded: 2019-07-19
Duration: 6 min 12 s
Description: The charge was discovered as a brand new property of matter, making it a topic of immediate curiosity. What were other findings regarding the behaviour of ch...

Question

State the principle of superposition in electrostatics. Obtain an expression for force on one charge due to all other charges present in its neighbourhood.

Accepted Answer

Superposition principle state that the total force on a given charge due to any number of point charges acting on it.Every charged particle creates an electric field in the universe in the space surrounding it.The electric field created due to the charge is independent of the presence or absence of all other charges.The electric field created can be calculated with the help of Coulomb's law.The principle of superposition allows for the combination of two or more electric fields.

The principle of superposition states that every charge in space creates an electric field at point independent of the presence of other charges in that medium.The resultant electric field is a vector sum of the electric field due to individual charges.

Therefore the force $F$ ,the resultant force can be given as follows.

$\vec{F_{r}} = \frac{1}{4 π \in} [\frac{Q q 1}{{r^{2}}_{12}} {\hat{r}}_{12} + \frac{Q q 2}{{r^{2}}_{13}} {\hat{r}}_{13}]$

where,

${\hat{r}}_{12} a n d {\hat{r}}_{13}$ are the unit vector along the direction of $q 1 a n d q 2$ .

$\in$ is the permittivity constant for the medium in which the charges are placed in.

$Q, q 1, q 2$ are the magnitude of the charges respectively.

$r_{12} a n d r_{13}$ are the distance between the charges $Q a n d q 1 a n d Q a n d q 2$ respectively.

State the principle of superposition in electrostatics. Obtain an expression for force on one charge due to all other charges present in its neighbourhood.

Important Questions on Electrostatics

Learn and Prepare for any exam you want !