Physics 15b Assignment #7 - take home portion of hour exam

Review chapters 1-5 of Purcell and the lecture materials on the web.
Problems due at the beginning of class on Thursday, March 24 — The class period on
Thursday will be taken up by the hour exam. Please try to be on time because we will start
promptly at 10:07am. What will happen is this. At the beginning of class, you will get a packet
containing the questions from the take-home, parts of our solutions, and the follow-up questions.
You will keep your problem set to consult during the follow-up process. At the end of class,
you will hand in the packet and your problem set together with your take-home inserted into the
in-class packet.
Because you can consult your take-home solutions during the exam, you may want to include
in your solutions any notes that you think may be helpful to you on the exam, even if they are not
a part of your solutions to the take-home problems. This is allowed. You can include anything
that you produce by your own intellectual effort. You may not simply copy something or print
a version of someone else’s LATEX file or anything like that. But if you want to write your own
physics textbook and include it with your solutions, that is fine (though we think that this will
not be an efficient use of your time). You may put your notes in a separate section at the end of
your take-home, and just hand them in along with the rest of your take-home at the end of the
in-class exam.
Calculators are allowed for the in-class test, but should not be essential.

7-th-1. It follows directly from the definition that the Thévenin effective EMF of a network of
batteries and resistors with two external leads is the open-circuit voltage difference between the
leads. It is much less obvious that the Thévenin effective resistance of the network is the resistance
of a similar network of resistors, but with all internal EMFs set to zero. In this problem, we will
suggest one possible proof of this statement. First consider as an example, the Thévenin effective
circuit for the circuit below.
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 That is we want to find a circuit of the form shown below with the same electrical properties in all
circuits.
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7-th-1a. Find the current through the external EMF E in the two circuits below.

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7-th-1b. In the second circuit, as E ! 1, the ratio of the current through the external EMF to
E goes to
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to
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where
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R= (7-th-1.3)
1=r1 + 1=r2

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that is to say, the resistance of the circuit with the internal EMFs set to zero

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7-th-1c. Now use dimensional analysis to construct a general proof of the statement that the
Thévenin effective resistance of a network is the resistance of a similar network of resistors, but
with all internal EMFs set to zero. State your assumptions carefully. Could anything go wrong?

7-th-2.
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The cone shown in the figure has a circular base of radius R centered at the origin in the x-y plane
and an apex at z = d on the z axis. In this problem you should compute the flux of the electric field
outward through the curved portion of the cone for a number of different fields. You may want to

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reduce the work you have to do by making judicious use of Gauss’s law. But be sure to justify any
assumptions you make in your calculation.

7-th-2a. Find the flux outward through the curved surface of the cone for the electric field
associated with the potential
(x; y; z ) =  (x2 y2)

7-th-2b. Find the flux outward through the curved surface of the cone for the electric field from
a point charge on the z axis at z = a. Plot your result from a = d to a = 2d.

7-th-2c. Find the flux outward through the curved surface of the cone for the electric field
associated with a sheet of uniform surface charge density  in the z = a plane. Plot your result
from a = d to a = 2d.

7-th-3. A conducting corner consists of two semi-infinite conductors, one in the y = 0 plane
for x  0 and all z , and the other in the y = x plane for x  0 and all z . A line of charge with
~ = (2a; a; z ) for a > 0 and all z .
uniform linear charge density  is placed at R

7-th-3a. Draw a diagram of a cross-section of this corner in the z = 0 plane and sketch the
electric field lines.

7-th-3b. Find the electric field explicitly for x > 0 and y < x.
7-th-3c. Find the force per unit length on the line of charge.

7-th-4. This is based on problem 5-19 in Purcell:

A proton moves in along the x axis toward the origin at a velocity vx = c=2. At the
origin, it collides wiht a massive nucleus, rebounds elastically and moves outward on
the x axis with nearly the same speed. Make a sketch showing approximately how the
electric field of which the proton is the source looks at an instant 10 10 sec after the
proton reached the origin.

7-th-4a. Make the sketch as instructed. Hint: read the problem carefully so that you know
what to sketch.

7-th-4b. Discuss how the picture depends on the velocity of incoming proton (always assuming
that the nucleus is massive enough that the outgoing speed is nearly the same as the incoming
speed).