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that its physical design allows it to hold negative and positive charges apart.
This makes capacitors very fast at charging and discharging, much faster
than batteries. They are essential for applications where rapid bursts of
current are needed, such as camera flashes.
Cartoon showing how discharging a capacitor can turn on a light bulb.
Do capacitors store charge?
Capacitors do not store charge. Capacitors actually store an imbalance of
charge. If one plate of a capacitor has 1 coulomb of charge stored on it, the
other plate will have -1 coulomb, making the total charge (added up across
both plates) zero. If you short circuit the capacitor by connecting the two
plates with a wire of negligible resistance, youll see a sudden rush of current
(depending on the size of the capacitor, this can result in sparks) as the
electrons on the -1 coulomb plate rush onto the +1 coulomb plate. This
sudden rush of current releases all the energy thats stored in the capacitor.
To help us understand parallel plate capacitors, consider this situation.
Imagine you start with two metal plates with no difference of charge (Q= 0).
You attach a battery, which at first adds a single electron to one side of the
capacitor. The electron has an electric field that repels other electrons, and
this field reaches through space and pushes on the electrons in the other
plate, causing that plate to acquire an induced positive charge. Now your first
plate has a charge of -1e, and the far plate has a charge of +1e, where e is
the way we normally write the elementary charge of a single electron.
Cartoon showing the flow of electrons when charging a capacitor.
Now imagine repeating this process over and over, until a considerable
amount of negative charge has built up on one plate and induced an equal
positive charge on the other plate. At some point, the existing negative
charge on the first plate will be so repulsive that it prevents you from adding
any more negative charges to that plate. In this case the capacitor is fully
charged. This maximum charge Q corresponds to the final voltage of the
charged capacitor in the relation Q= C V.
But how does the shape of the capacitor affect this process?
Distance: The further apart the two plates are, the less the free electrons
on the far plate feel the push of the electrons that youre adding to the
negative plate, making it harder to add more negative charges to the
negative plate. If the plates were infinitely far apart, you would just be adding
negative charges to an already negative metal surface, which would be pretty
hard. If the plates were very close to each other or even touching, you
essentially would be making current flow through a short circuit, which would
be easy. This means that the capacitance of a parallel plate must be inversely
Area: Its a lot easier to add charge to a capacitor if the parallel plates have
a huge area. Two wide metal plates would give two repelling like charges a
greater range to spread out across the plate, making it easier to add a lot
more negative charge to one plate. Likewise, a very small plate area would
cause the electrons to get cramped together earlier, making it harder to get a
large difference in charge for a given voltage. From this we can guess that
the capacitance of a parallel plate must be related to the plate areas.
Cartoon showing the difference between a positive and a negative plate. The
positive plate is missing electrons.
These two principles can be expressed as the parallel-plate capacitor formula:
C = A/d
A is the area of the plates, and L is the distance between the plates. is a
constant called the permittivity, which determines how easily the air between
the plates allows an electric field to form. If a different insulating material is
used inside the gap, this constant will have a different value, and so materials
with a higher value of this constant generally make better capacitors.
Consider the following cardiac defibrillators
Sometimes the regular rhythm of your heart pumping blood around your body
stops beating regularly. It turns out that the most effective way to make the
heart start ticking regularly is simply to shock it with a giant capacitor. When
a patients heart beats too fast or doesnt beat in the correct sequence
(called fibrillation), paramedics attach two electrodes to the patients chest.
These electrodes are connected to a defibrillator, which consists of a battery
and a giant capacitor. When paramedics use defibrillators, batteries slowly
charge the capacitor by adding electrons to one plate and pulling an equal
number of electrons off of the other plate. Once the capacitor is charged to
the set voltage, paramedics rapidly discharge the capacitor through the
electrodes on the patients chest in hopes of resetting the heart beat.