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Transient behavior of simple RC circuits

Norris W. Preyera)
Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina 29424

Received 25 October 2001; accepted 26 July 2002 I report on simulations of the evolution of surface charges, the retarded electric potential, and the electric eld in a simple resistorcapacitor RC circuit and in an RC circuit with a switch. The circuits have high resistance, so radiation and inductive effects are not signicant. The simulations illustrate nonquasistatic effects due to the nite speed of light, and should be useful in teaching students how circuits respond to changes. 2002 American Association of Physics Teachers. DOI: 10.1119/1.1508444

I. INTRODUCTION The wires in a circuit with steady currents are electrically neutral in their interiors,1 but have small amounts of charge on their surfaces. These surface charges are critical to the behavior we expect from circuits, for they make the electric eld parallel to the wires and ensure that the same amount of current ows in different parts of the circuit.2 If the electric eld and surface charges do not create the conditions for steady-state currents, rapid changes occur in the surface charge distribution until these conditions are satised. There is feedback because the electric elds change the surface charges and the surface charges create the electric eld. This feedback between charges and the electric eld is not instantaneous, because changes in the eld propagate at the speed of light c. Without these three ideas in mind surface charges modify the electric eld in circuits, electric elds modify the surface charges, and propagation delays , even simple questions about circuits are difcult to answer. However, with these concepts, questions such as, I know the charges in a wire move very slowly, so why does the light come on immediately when I ip the switch? can now be answered clearly and correctly.3 6 The concepts of surface charge and feedback are briey mentioned in many introductory and intermediate physics texts, but were not central to the pedagogical development of electrical circuits until the textbook by Chabay and Sherwood.3 These authors link the usually disparate topics of electrostatics and circuits by means of the surface charges and give students a qualitative understanding of circuit behavior. They also discuss the transient behavior of circuits when, for example, a switch is closed.4,7,8 In a previous paper9 I presented the results of calculations of surface charges and elds in simple resistorcapacitor RC circuits. These calculations showed, for the rst time, the actual distribution of surface charges in circuits chosen for their pedagogical value rather than for their analytical tractability. The importance of feedback between the surface charges and the elds in creating equilibrium in the circuit was emphasized. However, that work was incomplete, because it did not show the true time dependence of the surface charges and elds. Rather, it treated the time constant RC as being so large that propagation delays were unimportant. These calculations were sufcient to discern the feedback mechanisms at work, but could not indicate how the circuit would respond to sudden changes. This work addresses this important area.
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II. PRIOR WORK Much study has been given to equilibrium solutions for the surface charges and elds in circuits. There are several circuit geometries that are amenable to analytical solution: the innite straight wire and coaxial wires,1013 nite coaxial wires,2,14 circular loops,15 a spherical battery,16 and a squared coil 17 or ring18 in a magnetic eld. Timeindependent solutions are found by solving Laplaces equation. However, these solutions cannot show the transient behavior of the circuit before the establishment of the steady state. Rosser19 has given a short calculation showing the small number of charges needed to guide current through a bend. Sherwood and Chabay4 have given an extensive review of this literature. Some lecture demonstrations have been published that show the electric elds20 and surface charges detected with an electroscope 21,22 around a circuit. These demonstrations allow arbitrary one-dimensional and twodimensional circuits with resistors, capacitors, and batteries, but cannot show transient responses, which are only a few light-crossing times the time light takes to cross the circuit . Jemenkos textbook23 was perhaps the rst to recognize and discuss surface charges in an introductory text see also his answer to a student question about current ow24 . Hartel2527 discussed the pedagogical importance of surface charges in circuits. Swartz,28 Swartz and Miner,29 and Grifths30 are among the texts that discuss the role of surface charges and feedback in circuits. Chabay and Sherwood3,31 have produced an excellent introductory textbook using surface charges to link electrostatics and circuit concepts, rather than the typical text which treats these as disjoint topics. Computer calculations have been done to illustrate the peculiarities of the 1/r 2 force law32 and to augment the analytical calculations.2 White, Frederiksen, and Spoehr33 used a computer simulation of a transport model of charges in a circuit to study the effectiveness of various conceptual models in teaching electric circuits. Little computational work33 has been done on the transient behavior of surface charges in circuits, but there is much qualitative description.35,27,28 Moreau has derived Kirchhoffs laws from the transient behavior of circuits.34 III. ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM The system is a series LRC circuit with C 0.68 pF and L 20 nH. The resistance of the circuit was made relatively large (R 3.5 k , corresponding to a resistivity 0.80 m) for reasons discussed below. The mathematical
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http://ojps.aip.org/ajp/

solution of this circuit is well known if we ignore retardation effects. If we write the capacitor charge q q 0 e rt , the solutions for r are r
2 2

,
10 1 2

a local effect, in contrast to the global nature of the RC time constant and the light-crossing time. Note that and RC are proportional to each other because each depends on the resistivity. IV. DETAILS OF THE CALCULATIONS The resistorcapacitor circuits are similar to those modeled previously,9 following two examples in Chabay and Sherwood.31 All have capacitor plates 17 4.5 mm on a side, separated by 1.0 mm. The resistive connecting wires have a square cross-section 4.5 mm on each side. Equal and opposite charges are placed on the inner faces of the capacitor plates, and then the evolution of the circuits charges and elds is calculated. The circuit is assumed to obey a simple Drude model: the wires are lled with equal densities of positive and negative charges of magnitude e, and the local current density is related to the electric eld and the conductivity : J E. 4 The circuit is divided into cubic computational cells 0.50 mm on a side and contains approximately 50 50 10 2 104 cells. Any excess charge is assumed to reside in the center of each cell. The electric eld is calculated at the center of each face of a cell. Charges are then moved across the face from one cell to another, conserving charge, according to Eq. 4 multiplied by s 2 t, q E n s 2 t,
2

R/2L 8.85 10 s and 1/LC 7.39 where 2 1019 s 2 . Because 2 , the roots are all real and the charge does not oscillate, but decays to zero. If we use the binomial expansion and keep the positive root, we obtain
2

1 1
2

1
2

1 . RC

We see that the charge will behave as it would in a simple RC circuit, q q0 e


t/RC

This result would be incorrect if an assumption of the model, uniform current motion, is violated. For the circuits studied here, the surface charges and electric elds cannot immediately adjust themselves to produce a uniform current. Rather, the time scale of the feedback process is related to the shortest time that information can be exchanged in the circuit, which is the time light takes to cross the circuit. There are two time scales to compare in this problem: the /c, where is a characteristic size light-crossing time c of the system, and the resistorcapacitor time constant RC RC. Depending on the relative sizes of these two times, the system is in one of three different regimes: 1 If RC c , the relaxation of the circuit is limited by the speed of light, that is, the excess charges decay as rapidly as possible. In this case we expect that radiation and inductive effects will be important. This case is not treated in this work because it involves solving Maxwell equations with retardation effects. Complex numerical codes are available for this problem,35 but the hope of having students understand both the simulation technique and the results would be lost. 2 If RC c , the relaxation of the circuit is limited by the product RC. The speed of light is effectively innite and propagation delays can be ignored. This situation is treated in previous work in which it was assumed that all the charges in the circuit instantaneously interact with each other and retardation effects can be ignored.9 3 If RC c , the dynamics of the circuit will display features due to both the nite speed of light and the nite relaxation time of the circuit. For the parameters chosen so here, RC 2.4 ns, c 2.5 cm/c 80 ps, RC 30 c , which is large enough that inductive and radiative effects are not important, but sufciently small that propagation delays are quite visible in the simulations. A third time scale in the system is the free charge decay time,30 0 7.1 ps. This is the time constant for the dissipation of excess free charge in the circuit and sets the time scale for the transition of the switched circuit from open to closed this circuit is discussed below . This dissipation is
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where E n is the normal component of E at this surface, s is the area of the face ( 0.50 mm 2 ), and t 0.75 ps. This time step is about one-half the light-travel time across the cell. We cannot use Coulombs law to nd the electric eld because the circuit is not in quasistatic equilibrium. Jemenko23,30,36 has generalized Coulombs law for timedependent charges and currents to the form E 1 4
0

r r
2

/ t r rc

J/ t rc 2

d 3 r,

where r is the distance between the eld point and the source represents the retarded charge density, point, and (t r/c). The second and third terms correspond to radiation from the system.37 As described in Sec. V A 1, the circuits have an initial free-expansion phase with large currents and rapidly changing charge distributions. Because of the high resistance of the connecting wires, however, even during this phase the second and third terms in Eq. 6 were never more than 10 % and 2 %, respectively, of the rst term. Hence, the electric eld at the face of a cell was calculated solely from the retarded charge density, consistent with the assumed absence of radiative effects, E 1 4
0

r r
2

d 3r

1 4
0 i

q i ri r2 i

where q i is the charge in cell i and r i is the distance from the center of the face to the center of cell i. The calculation is started by placing 4 105 e/mm2 on the inner faces of the capacitor and the rest of the circuit is made neutral. The program makes a loop over all the cells in the circuit, calculating elds using Eq. 7 , updating charges
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Fig. 1. The simple resistorcapacitor circuit 30 ps after equal and opposite charges have been placed on the capacitor plates. The diagram is a cross section through the midplane of the circuit. The various gray shades represent the excess charge density, ranging between 5000 e/mm3 the charge density on the capacitor exceeds this range, which was chosen to illustrate the surface charges on the wires . The arrows plot the square root of the electric eld. The large eld vectors between the plates have been omitted. Also shown are the equipotentials from 5.0 V to 5.0 V in steps of 0.4 V. Positive negative equipotentials have a solid dashed line.

Fig. 2. The second circuit, a resistorcapacitor circuit with an initially insulating region a switch in the center of the lower wire. Equal and opposite charges were placed on the capacitor plates and the circuit allowed to equilibrate for several time constants. This diagram shows the circuit 15 ps after the switch begins conducting. The diagram is a cross section through the midplane of the circuit. The gray scale and other details are the same as in Fig. 1.

using Eq. 5 , and then repeating using the updated charge distribution. Enough previous steps are held in memory to enable the retarded charges to be retrieved or interpolated, as required . This calculation is done by direct summation, rather than by using a tree code38 or other sophisticated technique, because the number of cells is relatively small and because these codes do not include retardation effects. This simple summation technique also means that freshman physics students can understand how the calculations were performed. There is a substantial time penalty, however; each integration step takes about 5 min on six 400 MHz Pentium II computers that were run in parallel. Plots of the charge density, electric eld vectors, and scalar potential were made. The scalar potential V can be exactly calculated from the retarded charge density,30,36 V 1 4
0

Electrical switch: the single fat resistive wire now has a thin slice that forms a switch. If the conductivity of the slice is zero, the switch is open and there is an open circuit. If the slice is conducting switch closed , then the circuit is identical to the one described above. This circuit, with the switch open, was prepared by placing equal and opposite charges on the capacitor plates. The circuit was simulated for several RC time constants, which allowed the charges to distribute themselves around the circuit and the circuit to nearly reach equilibrium. At time t 0, the insulating segment becomes conducting, simulating the closing of a switch, and the system again evolves in time see Fig. 2 . A. Uniform resistive wire Figure 1 shows the circuit after 30 ps 40 computational steps have elapsed since charges were placed on the capacitor plates. Figure 3 shows six steps 0, 15, 30, 45, 90, and 150 ps in the evolution of the system. 1. Retardation effects Retardation effects are visible in the left-hand upper wire of the 30 ps picture Fig. 1, or the upper-right panel in Fig. 3 . The steep potential gradient and large electric eld are due solely to the left-hand positively charged plate. The rst elds to reach this point will come from the charges closest to this point in the circuit; because changes in the elds propagate with speed c, these charges are on the light-cone of this point. These strong elds give rise to an initial freeexpansion phase that rapidly removes charges from the capacitor plates see Fig. 4 . The potential becomes much more uniform and the electric eld much smaller to the right of this point, because the electric eld in this region has contributions from both plates. We now have the much weaker fringe eld of a pair of oppositely charged plates. This same pattern is seen throughout the circuit.
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d 3r

1 4
0 i

qi . ri

The range of magnitudes of the electric eld vectors is too large to easily plot, so the square root of the magnitude of the vectors is shown in the gures. The very large and uninteresting electric elds between the capacitor plates are not plotted.

V. RESULTS Two resistorcapacitor circuits were simulated that differed only in the arrangement of the connecting wire: Uniform resistive wire: a single fat wire of high resistance connects the capacitor plates. At time t 0, equal and opposite charges are placed on the capacitor plates and the system is allowed to evolve in time see Fig. 1 .
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Fig. 3. The evolution of the simple RC circuit. The diagrams are at 0, 15, 30, 45, 80, and 160 ps after charges have been placed on the capacitor plates. The gray scale and other details are the same as in Fig. 1. The electric elds are drawn 5 times larger in the last three diagrams to display small features more clearly.

2. Approach to equilibrium It takes approximately 40 ps for the combined electric eld and potential of both plates to reach the rst turn in the upper wires. During this interval there are essentially no other surface charges to modify the large electric eld of the closest plate of charge. After this time, however, we see surface charges starting to build up on all the wires and the circuit begins to reach steady state. It takes at least one lightcrossing time ( c 80 ps, lower-middle panel of Fig. 3 before the electric eld vectors in different parts of the circuit begin to point correctly, and after 2 c lower-right panel the eld vectors are still not uniform in magnitude.

The feedback processes in circuits3,9 become clear after about two light-crossing times compare the last two panels of Fig. 3 . As charges move into the upper corners of the circuit, the surface charges there increase until they drive current around the bend and down. We see this effect reected in the changing direction of E, from pointing horizontally into the corner to being tipped downward. We also see subtle modications of surface charge gradients between these two panels. These surface charges gradients are also part of a feedback loop that ensures that the same current ows throughout the circuit.3,1012,39

3. When is the time constant equal to RC? Figure 4 shows a graph of the charge on one capacitor plate as a function of time and shows that it takes about 300 ps ( 4 c ) before the decay becomes approximately exponential with a time constant of 2.67 ns close to the estimated RC 2.4 ns). The very large slope in the rst 40 or 50 ps corresponds to the current driven by a single capacitor plate, as discussed above. Haertel27 suggests the current in such an RC circuit should change, in a step-wise fashion, every light-crossing time as the circuit learns what other parts are doing. The initial fall in Fig. 4 can be taken as one of Haertels steps, but thereafter the decline is smooth. There are two reasons for the discrepancy: his example assumes that RC 4 c , so he has a few large steps in one RC time. The simulated circuits here have RC 30 c , so there are many small steps in one
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Fig. 4. The solid line is the charge on one capacitor plate plotted as a function of time. The dashed line corresponds to an exponential decay with a time constant of 2.67 ns. 1190 Am. J. Phys., Vol. 70, No. 12, December 2002

Fig. 5. The evolution of the switch region of circuit No. 2. The diagrams are at 0, 7.5, 15, 30, 60, and 160 ps after the switch is closed. The gray scale and other details are the same as in Fig. 1, except that the scale of the equipotentials is from 3.0 V to 3.0 V in steps of 0.24 V.

RC decay time. In addition, the circuit learns continuously about other parts of the circuit, rather than a single, global update, which also smears out the steps. B. Switched circuit The second circuit considered had an initially insulating region in the middle of one of the conducting wires. Charges

were placed on the capacitor plates and the circuit equilibrated for several RC time constants. The switch was made conducting and the circuit allowed to evolve in time. Figure 2 shows the circuit after 15 ps 20 computational steps have passed since the switch was closed. Figure 5 shows an enlargement of the region around the switch at various times after the switch was closed. Figure 6 shows the entire circuit at various times after the switch was closed.

Fig. 6. The evolution of circuit No. 2. The diagrams are at 0, 15, 30, 60, 160, and 320 ps after the switch is closed. The gray scale and other details are the same as in Fig. 1. The electric elds are drawn 5 times larger in the last three diagrams to display small features more clearly. 1191 Am. J. Phys., Vol. 70, No. 12, December 2002 Norris W. Preyer 1191

1. Effects near the switch The t 0 picture of Fig. 5 the top-left panel shows the electric elds and potential of the almost equilibrated open circuit in the region around the switch. As expected, almost all of the potential drop in the circuit occurs across the gap, and hence the electric eld in this region is very large. Positive and negative surface charges, partially creating this eld, have built up on either side of the switch region so it resembles another capacitor. After 15 ps top-right panel of Fig. 5 , the surface charges on the ends of the switch region are beginning to neutralize and the electric eld between them decreases. This neutralization occurs on the free-charge dissipation time 7.1 ps and is almost completely nished after 30 ps bottom-left panel of Fig. 5 . In addition, an unexpected effect appears: the electric eld lines are no longer parallel to the axis of the wires. This effect is due to retardation and superposition: the previously almost zero electric eld in this region was the sum of the elds of the local switch charges a nite capacitor and distant surface charges. The converging pattern of eld lines from distant charges originally matched the diverging pattern of eld lines from the nite capacitor.3 The electric eld of the local charges has decreased, but the distant charges have not yet learned of the switch closing so their electric eld has not changed. When distant surface charges learn of the switch closing and begin changing, the electric eld around the switch region decreases, straightens, and eventually matches that everywhere else in the circuit last panel of Fig. 5 . See Ref. 3, pp. 636 638 for a thorough discussion. 2. Global effects Figure 6 shows the behavior of the entire circuit as the switch is closed. Perhaps the most interesting feature is the behavior of the equipotential surfaces. Initially, the voltage across the switch was very large and almost all the equipotentials were spaced across this gap. As news of the switch closing propagates outward with speed c, we see the surface charges, electric elds, and equipotentials responding in different parts of the circuit. The feedback between current, surface charges, and electric eld works to create uniform current ow.3,9 This requires an electric eld of constant magnitude throughout the circuit, and hence evenly spaced equipotentials. The last panel of Fig. 6 shows that after four light-crossing times, the electric eld is approximately uniform everywhere in the circuit, and the equipotential surfaces are equally spaced around the circuit. VI. DISCUSSION The transient behavior of circuits is important for developing a qualitative understanding of the feedback processes in circuits.6 The simulations have shown how surface charges modify the electric eld and current, which in turn affect the surface charges, leading to steady-state behavior. The simulations are also helpful in demonstrating the tightly coupled nature of a circuit:27 we have to use both local and distant charges to understand the complex dynamics around the closing switch. We also see several distinct time scales: the light-crossing time c sets the scale for global equilibration, the excesscharge time sets the scale for local dissipation of excess charges at switches, and the RC time constant sets the time scale for the slow decay of charges and elds to zero.
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Animations and large color versions of the gures in this paper and other gures are available at http:// galaxy.cofc.edu/rcircuits.html. The computer codes are also available upon request. VII. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY These projects require the authors code. The code is designed to run on multiple computers, but can be run more slowly on a single computer depending on the number and speed of your computers, you may need hours to weeks of computer time . The software uses the message passing interface MPI 40 and the graphics are produced with the 41 DISLIN library. The code is written in FORTRAN 90 and will need to be compiled. It is necessary to keep RC large compared to c , or the assumptions in the program will be violated. 1 Investigate a circuit that has a resistor formed from a narrow segment of wire or a region of increased resistivity. Does the circuit come to equilibrium more quickly, or less quickly, than the simulations shown here? 2 Investigate a circuit with parallel branches. You could make the branches have equal or different resistances. 3 Start with different charge distributions than the ones shown in this paper. Does the circuit come to equilibrium more quickly, or less quickly, than the simulations shown here? ACKNOWLEDGMENT I thank Laney Mills for his careful reading of the paper.
Electronic mail: preyern@cofc.edu; URL: http://galaxy.cofc.edu But see M. A. Matzek and B. R. Russell, On the transverse electric eld within a conductor carrying a steady current, Am. J. Phys. 36, 905907 1968 and W. G. V. Rosser, Magnitudes of surface charge distributions associated with electric current ow, ibid. 38, 265266 1970 , who show that the Hall effect produces a very small excess charge density in the interior of a wire. For a current of 1 A in a copper wire with crosssectional area 1 mm2 , the volume charge density is about 6000 ions/m3 . 2 J. D. Jackson, Surface charges on circuit wires and resistors play three roles, Am. J. Phys. 64, 855 870 1996 . 3 R. W. Chabay and B. A. Sherwood, Matter and Interactions II: Electric and Magnetic Interactions Wiley, New York, 2002 . 4 B. A. Sherwood and R. W. Chabay, A unied treatment of electrostatics and circuits, http://www4.ncsu.edu:8030/ rwchabay/mi/ circuit.pdf. 5 W. G. V. Rosser, What makes an electric current ow, Am. J. Phys. 31, 884 885 1963 . 6 B. A. Thacker, U. Ganiel, and D. Boys, Macroscopic phenomena and microscopic processes: student understanding of transients in direct current electric circuits, Am. J. Phys. 67, Suppl. S25S31 1999 . 7 B. A. Sherwood and R. W. Chabay, Electrical interactions and the atomic structure of matter: Adding qualitative reasoning to a calculus-based electricity and magnetism course, pp. 2335, in Ref. 8. 8 Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Learning Electricity and Electronics with Advanced Educational Technology, edited by M. Caillot Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1993 . 9 N. W. Preyer, Surface charges and elds of simple circuits, Am. J. Phys. 68, 10021006 2000 . 10 A. Sommerfeld, Electrodynamics Academic, New York, 1952 , pp. 125 130. 11 A. Marcus, The electric eld associated with a steady current in a long cylindrical conductor, Am. J. Phys. 9, 225226 1941 . 12 B. R. Russell, Surface charge on conductors carrying steady currents, Am. J. Phys. 36, 527529 1968 . 13 See also A. K. T. Assis, W. A. Rodrigues, Jr., and A. J. Mania, The electric eld outside a stationary resistive wire carrying a constant current, Found. Phys. 29, 729753 1999 ; R. N. Varney and L. H. Fisher, Electric elds associated with stationary currents, Am. J. Phys. 52, 10971099 1984 give a review and critique of early work on this problem.
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A. K. T. Assis and J. I. Cisneros, Surface charges and elds in a resistive coaxial cable carrying a constant current, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst., I: Fundam. Theory Appl. 47, 63 66 1999 . 15 M. A. Heald, Electric elds and charges in elementary circuits, Am. J. Phys. 52, 522526 1984 . 16 W. M. Saslow, Consider a spherical battery..., Am. J. Phys. 62, 495501 1994 . 17 J. M. Aguirregabiria, A. Hernandez, and M. Rivas, An example of surface charge distribution on conductors carrying steady currents, Am. J. Phys. 60, 138 141 1992 . 18 J. M. Aguirregabiria, A. Hernandez, and M. Rivas, Surface charges and energy ow in a ring rotating in a magnetic eld, Am. J. Phys. 64, 892 895 1996 . 19 W. G. V. Rosser, Magnitudes of surface charge distributions associated with electric current ow, Am. J. Phys. 38, 265266 1970 . 20 O. Jemenko, Demonstration of the electric elds of current-carrying conductors, Am. J. Phys. 30, 1921 1962 . 21 W. R. Moreau, S. G. Ryan, S. J. Beuzenberg, and R. W. G. Syme, Charge density in circuits, Am. J. Phys. 53, 552553 1985 . 22 S. Parker, Electrostatics and current ow, Am. J. Phys. 38, 720723 1970 . 23 O. Jemenko, Electricity and Magnetism Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1966 , pp. 295304. 24 O. Jemenko, Electric elds in conductors, Phys. Teach. 15, 5253 1977 . 25 H. Hartel, The electric voltage, pp. 353362 in Ref. 26. 26 Aspects of Understanding Electricity: Proceedings of an International Conference, edited by R. Duit, W. Jung, and C. von Rhoneck IPN/ Schmidt & Klaunig, Kiel, Germany, 1985 . 27 H. Haertel, New approach to introduce basic concepts in electricity, pp. 521 in Ref. 8.

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C. E. Swartz, Phenomenal Physics Wiley, New York, 1981 . C. E. Swartz and T. Miner, Teaching Introductory Physics: A Sourcebook AIP Press, Woodbury, NY, 1997 . 30 D. J. Grifths, Introduction to Electrodynamics, 3rd ed. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1999 . 31 Ref. 3, pp. 636 638. 32 E. Martn and R. Chicon, Computer assisted learning of basic concepts in electricity and electromagnetic wave propagation, pp. 211226, Ref. 8. 33 B. Y. White, J. R. Frederiksen, and K. T. Spoehr, Conceptual models for understanding the behavior of electrical circuits, in Ref. 8, pp. 7795. These models were designed for educational research, not physical accuracy, and ignore the distinction between volume and surface charges and allow only nearest-neighbor interactions. 34 W. R. Moreau, Charge distribution on DC circuits and Kirchhoffs laws, Eur. J. Phys. 10, 286 290 1989 . 35 See, for example, http://www.emclab.umr.edu/emap.html or http://www.brunel.ac.uk/research/fdtd/emu.html 36 D. J. Grifths and M. A. Heald, Time-dependent generalizations of the BiotSavart and Coulomb laws, Am. J. Phys. 59, 111117 1991 . 37 K. T. McDonald, The relation between expressions for time-dependent electromagnetic elds given by Jemenko and by Panofsky and Phillips, Am. J. Phys. 65, 1074 1076 1997 . 38 S. Pfalzner and P. Gibbon, Many-Body Tree Methods in Physics Cambridge University Press, New York, 1996 . 39 A. Walz, Fields that accompany currents, pp. 403 412 in Ref. 26. 40 The MPI software library is available for most varieties of UNIX/LINUX, Macintosh OSX, and for WINDOWS NT/2000 from http://wwwunix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/ or http://www.lam-mpi.org/ 41 H. Michels, DISLIN software library, available for most varieties of UNIX/ LINUX and WINDOWS NT/2000 from http://www.linmpi.mpg.de/ dislin/dislin.html

Vacuum Pump. As the nineteenth century began to wind down, table-top vacuum pumps like this one were standard issue for college collections. This one, at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, was made by James W. Queen of Philadelphia; in 1881 it cost $45, which included a syphon gauge to indicate the extent of the vacuum. The apparatus has a density of air sphere screwed into the pump plate. One of the problems with a single-barrel vacuum pump is that the piston must be raised against the pressure of the atmosphere, a hard job for a large-diameter pump piston. Photograph and notes by Thomas B. Greenslade, Jr., Kenyon College 1193 Am. J. Phys., Vol. 70, No. 12, December 2002 Norris W. Preyer 1193

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