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There are various types of potential energy, each associated with a particular type of force. For example, the work of an elastic force is called elastic potential energy; work of the gravitational force is called gravitational potential energy; work of the Coulomb force is called electric potential energy; work of the strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force acting on the baryon charge is ...
The potential has units of energy per mass, e.g., J/kg in the MKS system. By convention, it is always negative where it is defined, and as x tends to infinity, it approaches zero. The gravitational field, and thus the acceleration of a small body in the space around the massive object, is the negative gradient of the gravitational potential ...
The electrostatic potential energy U E stored in a system of two charges is equal to the electrostatic potential energy of a charge in the electrostatic potential generated by the other. That is to say, if charge q 1 generates an electrostatic potential V 1 , which is a function of position r , then U E = q 2 V 1 ( r 2 ) . {\displaystyle U ...
The electric potential and the magnetic vector potential together form a four-vector, so that the two kinds of potential are mixed under Lorentz transformations. Practically, the electric potential is a continuous function in all space, because a spatial derivative of a discontinuous electric potential yields an electric field of impossibly ...
The gravitational potential energy is the potential energy an object has because it is within a gravitational field. The magnitude of the force between a point mass, M {\displaystyle M} , and another point mass, m {\displaystyle m} , is given by Newton's law of gravitation : [ 3 ] F = G M m r 2 {\displaystyle F={\frac {GMm}{r^{2}}}}
A thermodynamic potential (or more accurately, a thermodynamic potential energy) [1] [2] is a scalar quantity used to represent the thermodynamic state of a system.Just as in mechanics, where potential energy is defined as capacity to do work, similarly different potentials have different meanings.
In mathematics and mathematical physics, potential theory is the study of harmonic functions.. The term "potential theory" was coined in 19th-century physics when it was realized that two fundamental forces of nature known at the time, namely gravity and the electrostatic force, could be modeled using functions called the gravitational potential and electrostatic potential, both of which ...
In its basic form, it is the sum of the 'opposing' centrifugal potential energy with the potential energy of a dynamical system. It may be used to determine the orbits of planets (both Newtonian and relativistic ) and to perform semi-classical atomic calculations, and often allows problems to be reduced to fewer dimensions .