Module 4.1 Flashcards
Conductors
A material that allows the flow of electrical charge. Good conductors
have a larger amount of free charge carriers to carry a current.
Conservation of Charge
The total charge in a system cannot change
Conventional Current
The flow from positive to negative, used to describe the
direction of current in a circuit
Coulomb
The unit of charge
Electric Current
The rate of flow of charge in a circuit.
Electrolytes
Substances that contain ions that when dissolved in a solution, act
as charge carriers and allow current to flow
Electron Flow
The opposite direction to conventional current flow. Electrons flow
from negative to positive
Elementary Charge
The smallest possible charge, equal to the charge of an
electron.
Insulators
A material that has no free charge carriers and so doesn’t allow the
flow of electrical charge
Kirchhoff’s First Law
A consequence of the conservation of charge. The total
current entering a junction must equal the total current leaving it
Mean Drift Velocity
The average velocity of an electron passing through an
object. It is proportional to the current, and inversely proportional to the number of
charge carriers and the cross-sectional area of the object
Quantization of Charge
The idea that charge can only exist in discrete packets
of multiples of the elementary charge
Semiconductors
A material that has the ability to change its number of charge
carriers, and so its ability to conduct electricity. Light dependent resistors and
thermistors are both examples
how is coulomb defined
1 coulomb is defined as the flow of charge in a time of 1 second when the
current is 1 ampere
What happens when an atom gains an electron
It becomes a negative ion
The formula for the net charge on a particle
Q = ne where n is the number of electrons added or removed and e is the quantized charge value
Can be positive or negative
What is a liquid that can conduct a charged called
Electrolyte
what is the number density, n mean
it is the number of free electrons per unit volume
List the types of materials in order of highest number density to lowest
Conductors, semi-conductors, insulators
