Abstract
After defining the electric charge, we shall describe Coulomb’s experiment on the force between two point charges at rest in a vacuum and Millikan’s experiment on the elementary charge. We shall introduce the electric field and its potential, in time-independent conditions, and find and discuss the equations ruling these quantities, both in integral and differential form. We shall look at four important properties of electric charge, namely charge conservation, charge quantization, charge invariance and the equality of positive and negative elementary charges.
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Bettini, A. (2016). Electrostatic Field in a Vacuum. In: A Course in Classical Physics 3 — Electromagnetism. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40871-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40871-2_1
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