Potential Energy

Position of movable charge
1.0 m 10.0 m
2.0
Movable charge is:
Plot on the horizontal axis:

Worksheet for this simulation

In this simulation, you can investigate the electrostatic potential energy associated with two interacting charged particles, and how that potential energy varies with the distance between the particles. Neither charged particle owns the potential energy by itself - the energy comes from the interaction between the particles. Note that the arrows attached to the particles are force arrows. Using the buttons, you can plot the potential energy vs. various functions of the distance. What does it mean when the graph is a straight line?

Simulation first posted on 1-17-2016. Written by Andrew Duffy
Description re-worded on 1-9-2017.

Creative Commons License
This work by Andrew Duffy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This simulation can be found in the collection at http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/classroom.html.

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