UIUC Physics 435 EM Fields & Sources I Fall Semester, 2007 Lecture Notes 10 Prof. Steven Errede LECTURE NOTES 10
The Macroscopic Electric Field Inside a Dielectric
When we discuss electric (and/or magnetic) fields, whether they are outside of/exterior to matter, or inside the matter itself, implicitly, we physically interpret these field quantities to be associated with macroscopic averages over (vast) numbers of electromagnetic quanta (i.e. virtual photons), atoms, molecules, electric charges (both +ve and –ve) etc. The “true” E & B-fields inside of matter - at the atomic scale - are wildly varying from point to point (and also wildly varying in time, e.g. on short/atomic time-scales due to fluctuation(s) in thermal energies at finite temperature). For almost all applications that we are interested in, we are not concerned with these wild spatial (and temporal) fluctuations on the atomic scale; we are primarily concerned with the average / mean fields extant in these media, suitably averaged over large numbers of constituent particles involved. These (space and time-averaged) fluctuations die out as 1 N where N is the 23 number of constituents involved. If N 10 , then sinceσ N = N , then for random fluctuations −12 (i.e. Gaussian-distributed) the fractional fluctuations, σ N NNNN==13.210 × are extremely small – essentially negligible! Hence the macroscopic (i.e. microscopically averaged- over) E-field can be seen as being truly electrostatic, for so-called time-independent situations.