On the interaction of point charges in an arbitrary domain

Based on Gauss's law for the electric field, new integral formulas are deduced. Although the applications are not limited within the physics realm, an application is also presented, for the sake of practicability, specifically in the area of semiconductor junctions.

Singular charge sources in terms of Dirac delta functions present a well-known numerical challenge for solving Poisson's equation. For a sharp interface between inhomogeneous media, singular charges could be analytically treated by fundamental solutions or regularization methods. However, no analytical treatment is known in the literature in case of a diffuse interface of complex shape. This letter reports the first such regularization method that represents the Coulomb poten...

We present a few charge distributions for which the application of Gauss' law in its integral form, as typically outlined in standard textbooks, results in a contradiction. We identify the root cause of such contradictions and put forward a solution to resolve them.

We develop a boundary element method to calculate Van der Waals interactions for systems composed of domains of spatially constant dielectric response. We achieve this by rewriting the interaction energy expression exclusively in terms of surface integrals of surface operators. We validate this approach in the Lifshitz case and give numerical results for the interaction of two spheres as well as the van der Waals self-interaction of a uniaxial ellipsoid. Our method is simple ...

Problems involving boundary conditions on corrugated surfaces are relevant to understand nature, since, at some scale, surfaces manifest corrugations that have to be taken into account. In introductory level electromagnetism courses, a very common and fundamental exercise is to solve Poisson's equation for a point charge in the presence of an infinity perfectly conducting planar surface, which is usually done by image method. Clinton, Esrick and Sacks [Phys. Rev. B 31, 7540 (...

We consider two point charges in electrostatic interaction between them within the framework of a nonlinear model, associated with QED, that provides finiteness of their field energy. We argue that if the two charges are equal to each other the repulsion force between them disappears when they are infinitely close to each other, but remains as usual infinite if their values are different. This implies that within any system to which such a model may be applicable the point ch...

An algorithm for fast calculation of the Coulombic forces and energies of point particles with free boundary conditions is proposed. Its calculation time scales as N log N for N particles. This novel method has lower crossover point with the full O(N^2) direct summation than the Fast Multipole Method. The forces obtained by our algorithm are analytical derivatives of the energy which guarantees energy conservation during a molecular dynamics simulation. Our algorithm is very ...

We propose a novel efficient algorithm to solve Poisson equation in irregular two dimensional domains for electrostatics. It can handle Dirichlet, Neumann or mixed boundary problems in which the filling media can be homogeneous or inhomogeneous. The basic idea of the new method is solve the problem in three steps: (i) First solve the equation $\nabla\cdot\mathbf D=\rho$. The inverse of the divergence operator in a restricted subspace is found to yield the electric flux densit...

We obtain a modified version of Coulomb's law in two- and three-dimensional closed spaces. We demonstrate that in a closed space the total electric charge must be zero. We also discuss the relation between total charge neutrality of a isotropic and homogenous universe to whether or not its spatial sector is closed.

We discuss, in the context of classical electrodynamics with a Lorentz invariant cut-off at short distances, the self-force acting on a point charged particle. It follows that the electromagnetic mass of the point charge occurs in the equation of motion in a form consistent with special relativity. We find that the exact equation of motion does not exhibit runaway solutions or non-causal behavior, when the cut-off is larger than half of the classical radius of the electron.