Chapter 17: Electric Potential and Electric Energy; Capacitance Objectives

• Electric Potential and Electric Potential Energy—what are they and how are they related?
  
  
• What is Voltage and how does it relate to electric potential?
  
  
• How are the electric potential and the electric field related?
  
  
• The Electron Volt, a unit of energy—how do I calculate it?
  
  
• What is the electric potential around a point charge or point charges?
  
  
• How do I use this to calculate the potential surrounding an Electric Dipole?
  
  
• What is a Capacitor, how is it made, what does it do?
  
  
• How can I use it to Store Energy?

NOTE:

In order to take advantage of the new features in Java, from Chapter 16 on, the Physlet® Problems module uses the the new release of the JDK, JDK 1.1.

Currently, the new version of Java is supported on PCs. running Win95/NT. It is currently not supported on Macs, although we anticipate this will change soon, hopefully by the fall semester.

In addition, on PCs, the new version of Java works best with the Internet Explorer 4 web browser.

If you are using a PC running Win 95/NT and are using Netscape, please download the latest version of Netscape, currently Netscape 4.06.

The recommended system requirements to use the applets in the Physlet® Problems modules are:

• a Pentium 90 with 16MB RAM or Power Macintosh with 32MB RAM
• either Netscape 3.0.3 and higher or Internet Explorer 4.0. Internet Explorer 3.0/AOL browser does not work!
• Your internet connection should be through your school's local area network. Using a 28.8 modem will result in dramatically increased load times.