Gauss' law relates the electric flux through a closed surface to the net charge enclosed by that surface. Gauss's law can be applied to find the electric field and the charge enclosed in a region depending on its charge distribution.
Consider a cross-section of a thin, infinite conducting plate having a positive charge. For such a large thin plate, as the thickness of the plate tends to zero, the positive charges lie on the plate's two large faces. Without an external electric field, the...

Atoms generally contain the same number of positively and negatively charged particles, protons, and electrons. Hence, they are electrically neutral. However, the centers of the positive and negative charges do not always coincide. In such a scenario, the electric field of an atom may not be zero.
A separation of the positive and negative charges can lead to a weak, remnant effect of the positive and negative charges. The expectation is that the more the distance between the positive and...

Consider two point charges, each exerting Coulomb force on the other. It is possible to describe the Coulomb interaction via an intermediate step by defining a new physical quantity called the electric field.
In the new picture, imagine that the first charge sets up an electric field independent of all other charges in the universe. When another charge comes in its vicinity, the second charge experiences an electric force depending on the electric field at that point. The source charge does not...

The three-dimensional representation of the electric field of a positive point charge requires tracing the electric field vectors, whose lengths decrease as the square of their distance from the charge and which point away from the charge at each point. This vector field is no doubt challenging to visualize. The visualization of electric fields becomes quickly intractable as the number of charges increases.
The solution to this problem is to use electric field lines, which are not vectors but...

When an electric field accelerates a free positive charge, it acquires kinetic energy. This process is analogous to an object being accelerated by a gravitational field as if the charge were going down an electrical hill where its electric potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, although, of course, the sources of the forces are very different. The electrostatic or Coulomb force acting on the positive test charge is conservative, which means that the work done on a test charge is...

For a system of charges, it is easy to calculate the system's potential because potential is a scalar quantity. However, in some instances where calculating the electric field is more straightforward than finding the potential, the electric field is used to calculate the system's potential. For a positive charge, the electric field is radially outward, and the potential is positive at any finite distance from the positive charge. In such an electric field, the motion away from the...