Surface Charge in Electrostatics and Circuits

In electrostatics and in circuits, charge buildups on the surfaces of conductors contribute to the electric field inside and outside of the conductors. A relaxation method based on field was used to compute the surface charge distributions in 3D for a number of interesting configurations, using Python with the Numpy vectorization library. These distributions and the associated fields can be explored interactively with a GlowScript/VPython program at glowscript.org/\#/user/Bruce\_Sherwood/folder/MI4e/program/18-SurfaceCharge. The talk will highlight some of the interesting features of these charge distributions.