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In electromagnetism, a dielectric (or dielectric medium) is an electrical insulator that can be polarised by an applied electric field.When a dielectric material is placed in an electric field, electric charges do not flow through the material as they do in an electrical conductor, because they have no loosely bound, or free, electrons that may drift through the material, but instead they ...
Polarizability is responsible for a material's dielectric constant and, at high (optical) frequencies, its refractive index. The polarizability of an atom or molecule is defined as the ratio of its induced dipole moment to the local electric field; in a crystalline solid, one considers the dipole moment per unit cell. [1]
The relative permittivity (in older texts, dielectric constant) is the permittivity of a material expressed as a ratio with the electric permittivity of a vacuum. A dielectric is an insulating material, and the dielectric constant of an insulator measures the ability of the insulator to store electric energy in an electrical field.
In many materials the polarizability starts to saturate at high values of electric field. This saturation can be modelled by a nonlinear susceptibility. These susceptibilities are important in nonlinear optics and lead to effects such as second-harmonic generation (such as used to convert infrared light into visible light, in green laser pointers).
A related effect is Maxwell-Wagner-Sillars polarization, where charge carriers blocked at inner dielectric boundary layers (on the mesoscopic scale) or external electrodes (on a macroscopic scale) lead to a separation of charges. The charges may be separated by a considerable distance and therefore make contributions to the dielectric loss that ...
In the presence of an electric field, e.g., the electromagnetic field around an electron, these particle–antiparticle pairs reposition themselves, thus partially counteracting the field (a partial screening effect, a dielectric effect). The field therefore will be weaker than would be expected if the vacuum were completely empty.
By means of different factors, such as diffusion and steric, hydrodynamic, dielectric and other effects, or a combination thereof, particles (<1 μm in diameter) with different dielectric or diffusive properties attain different positions away from the chamber wall, which, in turn, exhibit different characteristic concentration profile.
It can also lose energy due to scattering into free-space or into other directions. The electric field falls off evanescently perpendicular to the metal surface. At low frequencies, the SPP penetration depth into the metal is commonly approximated using the skin depth formula. In the dielectric, the field will fall off far more slowly.