The ideal conductor limit

This paper compares two methods of statistical mechanics used to study a classical Coulomb system S near an ideal conductor C. The first method consists in neglecting the thermal fluctuations in the conductor C and constrains the electric potential to be constant on it. In the second method the conductor C is considered as a conducting Coulomb system the charge correlation length of which goes to zero. It has been noticed in the past, in particular cases, that the two methods yield the same results for the particle densities and correlations in S. It is shown that this is true in general for the quantities which depend only on the degrees of freedom of S, but that some other quantities, especially the electric potential correlations and the stress tensor, are different in the two approaches. In spite of this the two methods give the same electric forces exerted on S.

• Publication year

  1995

• Venue

  Journal of Physics A

• Publication date

  1995-11-15

• Fields of study

  Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1088/0305-4470/29/6/004arXiv cond-mat/9511076
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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