Tuesday, June 7, 2016

electrostatics - Direction of dmathbfl


A solid sphere has charge q and radius R. Find the potential at a point a distance r from the center of the sphere where r>R, using infinity as the reference point.


My attempt:


From Gauss' theorem we may deduce that E=14πϵ0qr2ˆr where r is the distance of an arbitrary point from the center of the sphere provided r>R.


V=rEdl


My question: What is dl? Since we are traversing in the direction opposite to ˆr, I think it should be drˆr. But when I use it to find V, I get a sign error. Please help!



Answer




I am going to contradict the answers by @Bio (whose answer has since been deleted) and @lineage and say that dl is actually drˆr The other answers are mathematically correct, but it goes against our physical intuition with how the limits of integration are set up, as it seems you were discussing in the comments of the answer.


Indeed, it would be nice if our lower limit of integration was where we started and the upper limit was where we ended. This makes so much more sense if we make dl=drˆr. This is because the sign of dr is actually determined by our limits already. In general, if we are integrating from r=a to r=b we will have ΔV=baErdr


If b>a then dr is positive, and if $b (which is what you are looking at) then dr is negative. The sign is already taken care of depending on how you set up the limits! You don't need to explicitly put in the sign of dr


This is why in @Bio's answer (as well as @lineage's answer I believe, although that answer is very convoluted, so I am unsure) you need to switch the limits of integration. That way you are doing two sign changes, resulting in the same integral. While this is mathematically correct, I feel like you really lose the physical intuition of adding up these values as you move from the start to the end of the path. @Bio's integral is technically moving backwards along the path while adding up the negative of the values given by the integrand, thus yielding the same result.


No comments:

Post a Comment

classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

I am studying Statics and saw that: The moment of a force about a given axis (or Torque) is defined by the equation: $M_X = (\vec r \times \...