elementary charge

(noun)

The electric charge on a single proton.

Related Terms

Examples of elementary charge in the following topics:

  • The Electron-Volt

    • The electron volt is a unit of energy useful in the physics of elementary charges and electricity.
    • The electron volt, symbolized as eV and sometimes written as electronvolt, is a unit of energy useful in the physics of elementary charges and electricity.
    • The electron volt is defined as the amount of energy gained or lost by the charge of an electron moved across a one-volt electric potential difference.
    • As such, it is equal to the product of one volt (1 J/C) and one elementary charge, giving it a value in joules approximately equal to 1.602×10-19 J.
    • All calculations of energy from the above equation were quantized as multiples of the elementary charge, q, for a given voltage, and thus arose the common usage of the electron volt as a unit of measurement.

  • Static Electricity, Charge, and the Conservation of Charge

    • In both instances, charged particles will experience a force when in the presence of other charged matter.
    • The SI unit for charge is the Coulomb (C), which is approximately equal to $6.24\times 10^{18}$ elementary charges.
    • (An elementary charge is the magnitude of charge of a proton or electron. )
    • In physics, charge conservation is the principle that electric charge can neither be created nor destroyed.
    • The net quantity of electric charge, the amount of positive charge minus the amount of negative charge in the universe, is always conserved.

  • The Hall Effect

    • When a magnetic field is present that is not parallel to the motion of moving charges within a conductor, the charges experience the Lorentz force.
    • On the other face, there is an excess of opposite charge remaining.
    • Thus, an electric potential is created so long as the charge flows.
    • For a metal containing only one type of charge carrier (electrons), the Hall voltage (VH) can be calculated as a factor of current (I), magnetic field (B), thickness of the conductor plate (t), and charge carrier density (n) of the carrier electrons:
    • Express Hall voltage for a a metal containing only one type of charge carriers

  • The Millikan Oil-Drop Experiment

    • In 1911, using charged droplets of oil, Robert Millikan was able to determine the charge of an electron.
    • Performed by Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher in 1911, the experiment was designed to determine the charge of a single electron, otherwise known as the elementary electric charge.
    • Millikan then calculated the charge on particles suspended in mid-air.
    • Thus, it was concluded that the elementary electric charge was 1.5924(17)×10−19 C.
    • Explain the difference in value of a real electron's charge and the charge measured by Robert Millikan

  • Avogador's Number

  • Introduction to Simple Harmonic Motion

    • You will remember from your elementary physics courses that if you want to know the electric field produced by a collection of point charges, you can figure this out by adding the field produced by each charge individually (my treatment of elementary simple harmonic motion is standard in most introductory physics textbooks.
    • That is, if we have n charges $\left\{q_i\right\}_{i=1,n}$, then the total electric field is (neglecting constant factors):
    • is the electric field of the ith point charge (Coulomb's law).

  • Energy, Mass, and Momentum of Photon

    • A photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of light, which carries momentum and energy.
    • A photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of light.
    • It has no rest mass and has no electric charge.
    • For example, when a charge is accelerated it emits photons, a phenomenon known as synchrotron radiation.

  • Photon Interactions and Pair Production

    • Pair production refers to the creation of an elementary particle and its antiparticle, usually when a photon interacts with a nucleus.
    • Below is an illustration of pair production, which refers to the creation of an elementary particle and its antiparticle, usually when a photon interacts with a nucleus.
    • Some other conserved quantum numbers such as angular momentum, electric charge, etc., must sum to zero as well.

  • Introduction to Elementary operations and Gaussian Elimination

    • If you have a matrix that can be derived from another matrix by a sequence of elementary operations, then the two matrices are said to be row or column equivalent.
    • The first is the application of elementary operations to try to put the matrix in row-reduced form; i.e., making zero all the elements below the main diagonal (and normalizing the diagonal elements to 1).

  • Electric Field from a Point Charge

    • The electric field of a point charge is, like any electric field, a vector field that represents the effect that the point charge has on other charges around it.
    • If the charge is positive, as shown above, the electric field will be pointing in a positive radial direction from the charge q (away from the charge).
    • This means that because the charges are both positive and will repel one another, the force on the test charge points away from the original charge.
    • If the test charge were negative, the force felt on that charge would be:
    • The electric field of a positively charged particle points radially away from the charge.