How is surface charge accumulated?

In summary: in the case when wire is not connected to battery, but we have circuit open, what happens to the surface charges when we connect wire to battery ? does it cause the surface charges to move or does it just add more surface charges to the wire ?
  • #36
gionole said:
It still does not say much. Can you read my 2 previous replies here ? In open circuit image, I presume that surface charge distribution is decreasing all along the wire in positive side.(same idea to negative side, but focusing on positive only). So the higher is in region 1, less in region 2, even less in region 3. The reason I say this is due to my logic in my previous 2 replies. Your image is still confusing, sorry.
Thanks for your reply. To understand your idea please find attatched your idea and mine on the sketch.
スライド4.PNG
 
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  • #37
@Dale

hey Dale, have you had the chance to look at my previous reply ? I think I will convey my final assumptions now and we can close this topic !

ASSUMPTION 1(open circuit): as I said previously, in region 1 and 2, there're different magnitudes of E produced by the battery due to the distance as region 2 is more far than region 1. Due to this, in order not to be constrained to say E=0, in region 1 and 2, we need the opposite magnitude of E so E_net = 0. If we assume surface charges are the same in both regions, we'll be doomed as it can't cancel out both E1 in region 1 and E2 in region 2 as E1 > E2, so in order to cancel out E1, there must be more surface charges in region 1. I think you agreed with me here and I will go ahead now and say that by following this logic, on the positive side(focusing only on positive side for simplicity), we should get surface charge distribution in a way that it decreases each time we get more far away from positive terminal. So region 1 has more surface charge density than region 2 and region 3 even has less surface charge density than region 1. So it's like r1 > r2 > r3. This is only true for sure as long as E produced by the battery in region 3 is less than in region 2. By looking at my open circuit, it might not be true, but you get the point that the more far away the region is from the terminal, the less surface charges will accumulate there than in the region that's closer to the battery. Also, on the very end(Region 7), we will still get surface charges depending on the E by the battery in there which I repeat for sure will be bigger than E in region 3, so region 3 should have less surface charges than region 7. I think this all sums it up roughly. So sum up is more strong E field is by the battery in a region, that region will have more surface charges then other region where E by the battery is lower. This all translates to the distance from the terminals to where we're checking to see surface charges.

The reason I want to get green light about the my assumption above is, on the paper, I looked at fig 7 and i can see that in region 1's some parts, there're less surface charges, then in region 2's some parts. I understand that fig 7 depicts the closed circuit image, but I'm trying not to make a mistake here. hopefully such phenomena wouldn't be produced in open circuit right ? if so, I get the idea and should be enough.
 

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