The Electric Field of a charged disk can teach us important concepts that you will see over and over in physics: superposition, cylindrical coordinates and non-constant basis vectors. To get a glimpse of the power of superposition, we will solve this problem the hard way first and then see how superposition can be a powerfull tool.
Let us calculate the Electric Field at a point P above the center of a charged disk with radius of R and a uniform surface charge density of as shown in below figure.
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Starting with the general formula for a surface charge
choose a coordinate system. A disk clearly lends itself to cylindrical coordinates. As a refresher, the next figure shows the infinitesimal displacement, where we have the infinitesmal area
cartesian coordinates:
cylindrical coordinates:
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The vectors to the source and field points that are needed for the integration in cylindrical coordinates
therefore
substituting these relationships into (1) gives us
As usual break up the integration into the and components
{\mathbf z} component:
Since is always in the same direction and has the same magnitude (unit vector), it is constant and can be brought out of the integration. Integrating the ds them
using u substitution
with the limits of integration becoming
trasnforming the integral to
integrating
evaluating the limits
integrating again simply gives
component:
If you cannot simply see how the component is zero through symmetry, then carry out the integration. The key thing to learn here, and why it is not good to just skip over the component, is to realize that is not constant throughout the integration. Therefore, one cannot bring it out of the integration. What needs to be done is to substitute in for . An important result from cylindrical coordinates is the relation between its unit vectros and those of cartesian coordinates.
Plugging in the into our integral
component:
To make our job easier, let us first integrate
Note how can be taken out of integral, so we get
Evaluating the limits, gives us the result we expected.
component:
integrating
which once again yeilds a zero.
Since the x and y components are zero
Therefore, for a charged disk at a point above the center, we have
and rearranging
Before we can apply superposition to this problem, we need to calculate the electric field of a charged ring. This entry is coming soon.