Paper 4, Section II, A
Write down the Lorentz force law for a charge travelling at velocity in an electric field and magnetic field .
In a space station which is in an inertial frame, an experiment is performed in vacuo where a ball is released from rest a distance from a wall. The ball has charge and at time , it is a distance from the wall. A constant electric field of magnitude points toward the wall in a perpendicular direction, but there is no magnetic field. Find the speed of the ball on its first impact.
Every time the ball bounces, its speed is reduced by a factor . Show that the total distance travelled by the ball before it comes to rest is
where and are quadratic functions which you should find explicitly.
A gas leak fills the apparatus with an atmosphere and the experiment is repeated. The ball now experiences an additional drag force , where is the instantaneous velocity of the ball and . Solve the system before the first bounce, finding an explicit solution for the distance between the ball and the wall as a function of time of the form
where is a function and and are dimensional constants, all of which you should find explicitly.