Electrostatics

Electrostatics studies electric charges at rest and the electric fields, forces, and potentials they produce. Its central law, Coulomb’s law, describes the force between stationary point charges.

Coulomb's law: A law giving the electric force between two stationary point charges as proportional to their product and inversely proportional to distance squared. It quantifies the force between the stationary charges at electrostatics’ core.
Electric charge: A conserved property of matter that causes electromagnetic interactions and occurs in positive and negative forms. Electrostatics begins with charge as the source of electric forces and fields.
Capacitance: A measure of how much electric charge a conductor or system stores per unit potential difference. Electrostatic fields between conductors determine their ability to store charge.
Magnetostatics: The study of magnetic fields produced by steady currents and time-independent magnetic sources. It treats static magnetic sources, whereas electrostatics treats stationary electric charges.
Electric field: A vector field that gives the electric force per unit positive test charge at each point in space. It expresses how a charge distribution influences other charges throughout space.
Superposition principle: A rule stating that the net effect of multiple sources is the sum of their individual effects in a linear system. It lets fields from separate charges be added to find a total field.
Capacitor: An electrical component that stores separated charge and energy in an electric field. It uses controlled electrostatic geometry to store electrical energy.
Electrodynamics: The study of electric and magnetic fields that vary with time and their interactions with matter. It generalizes static electric analysis to changing fields and moving charges.
Electric potential: Electric potential is electric potential energy per unit charge at a location. It describes charge distributions through scalar energy differences rather than force vectors.
Electric flux: A measure of how much electric field passes through a surface, defined by a surface integral. Flux connects electric fields to enclosed charge in Gauss’s law.

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