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In physics, potential energy is the energy of an object or system due to the body's position relative to other objects, or the configuration of its particles. The energy is equal to the work done against any restoring forces, such as gravity or those in a spring.
Electric potential energy is a potential energy (measured in joules) that results from conservative Coulomb forces and is associated with the configuration of a particular set of point charges within a defined system.
The gravitational potential (V) at a location is the gravitational potential energy (U) at that location per unit mass: =, where m is the mass of the object. Potential energy is equal (in magnitude, but negative) to the work done by the gravitational field moving a body to its given position in space from infinity.
Electric potential (also called the electric field potential, potential drop, the electrostatic potential) is defined as the amount of work/energy needed per unit of electric charge to move the charge from a reference point to a specific point in an electric field.
For two pairwise interacting point particles, the gravitational potential energy is the work that an outside agent must do in order to quasi-statically bring the masses together (which is therefore, exactly opposite the work done by the gravitational field on the masses): = = where is the displacement vector of the mass, is gravitational force acting on it and denotes scalar product.
Energy is a scalar quantity, and the mechanical energy of a system is the sum of the potential energy (which is measured by the position of the parts of the system) and the kinetic energy (which is also called the energy of motion): [1] [2]
The Helmholtz free energy is defined as [3], where . F is the Helmholtz free energy (sometimes also called A, particularly in the field of chemistry) (SI: joules, CGS: ergs),; U is the internal energy of the system (SI: joules, CGS: ergs),
If F is a conservative vector field (also called irrotational, curl-free, or potential), and its components have continuous partial derivatives, the potential of F with respect to a reference point r 0 is defined in terms of the line integral: = = (()) ′ (), where C is a parametrized path from r 0 to r, (),, =, =.