Coulomb's Law : Coulomb's law states that the force between two point charges is directly proportional to the magnitude of the charges and inversely proporti...
Coulomb's Law:
Coulomb's law states that the force between two point charges is directly proportional to the magnitude of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
where:
F is the force in newtons
k is Coulomb's constant, approximately 9 x 10^9 N m^2/C^2
q1 and q2 are the charges in coulombs
r is the distance between the charges in meters
Superposition Principle:
The superposition principle states that when two or more point charges are placed in a region, the net force on each charge will be equal to the vector sum of the individual forces.
where F1, F2, etc., are the individual forces.
Example:
If two charges of equal magnitude q are separated by a distance r, the force between them will be inversely proportional to r^2, meaning that the force will be much weaker if the distance between them is larger.
Similarly, if three charges of equal magnitude q are placed on the corners of a square, the total force on any one charge will be equal to the vector sum of the forces of each of the individual charges