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Re: IONS/metals EUREKA



Bob Sciamanda wrote:
No sale!

If an electron tries to leave the surface of a NEUTRAL conductor, it will
of course be attracted back by the now positively charged "mother" body -
separated charges will naturally try to re-combine!. That is pure
Maxwellian.

Your problem was the stability of an unbalanced charge deposited on the
surface of a body.

So the escaping electron will see a superposition of it's image and the
overall charge of the body. The effect of the image charge will dominate
because it is so much closer than the body (acting as a point at it's
center of mass.

Take a 1 cm radius, charged metal sphere. Say an electron has managed
somehow to get 0.5 nm from the surface (a long ways!) Thus the image
charge is 1 nm away, 10^7 times closer than the center of the sphere. In
order for the charge on the sphere to overcome the effect of the image
charge, we need 10^14 electrons (1/r^2), or 16 uC. This puts the sphere at
14 MV (wow, I'd forgotten how huge a Coulomb is).

--
--James McLean
jmclean@chem.ucsd.edu
post doc
UC San Diego, Chemistry