What is the electric field Ē. at a point outside the cell 3.25 µm from the surface?
Please help solve for E4
The electric field can be calculated with the help of Gauss' law of electrostatic.
Let us assume a symmetrical Gaussian surface at a distance from the center of the sphere and outside the sphere. The Gauss' law for such a surface can be written as,
Here, is the electric field, is any elemental surface area on the imaginary Gaussian surface of radius , is the total charge enclosed by the Gaussian surface and is the permittivity of free space.
Here the direction of the electric field and the elemental surface area are considered to be positive along the direction away from the center of the sphere. That's why the dot product is written by considering the cosine term to be .
In the given problem, the Gaussian surface is outside the original sphere, which is the modeled red blood cell. Thus, total charge enclosed by the Gaussian surface is the total charge that lies on the surface of the red blood cell.
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