Paper 3, Section II, A
Part IB, 2014
(i) Consider charges at and at . Write down the electric potential.
(ii) Take . A quadrupole is defined in the limit that such that tends to a constant . Find the quadrupole's potential, showing that it is of the form
where . Determine the constants and .
(iii) The quadrupole is fixed at the origin. At time a particle of charge has the same sign as and mass is at travelling with velocity , where
Neglecting gravity, find the time taken for the particle to reach the quadrupole in terms of , given that the force on the particle is equal to .