If a metal object is placed in a gravitational field, .the nuclei and electrons in the metal will sink. This will produce a new charge distribution inside the metal. A modified charge distribution implies a modified electric field in the metal interior.
This thesis investigates some possible physical processes which give rise to the gravitationally induced electric field inside a metal. To this end, a simple model of a metal is constructed.
Comprising the model are ions, arranged on a differentially compressed lattice, and a gas of conduction electrons. An ion is represented by a nucleus and an electron which are confined together inside a hard, massless, spherical shell. The nucleus is treated as a point particle while the electron is represented by a wave function. The conduction electron constituent is modelled as a gas of non-interacting fermions which is subject to an external linear potential,
The design of the model facilitates the investigation of two possible sources of the electric field: gravitationally induced ionic dipole moments, and the charge imbalance in the metal. To first order in g, only the first source matters, contributing approximately –Mg/q[sub=e] to the electric field, where M is the ionic mass, g is the acceleration due to gravity, and q[sub=e] is the electronic charge. The net gravitationally induced electric field is also found to be approximately -Mg/q[sub=e], / Science, Faculty of / Physics and Astronomy, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/23234 |
| Date | January 1982 |
| Creators | Shegelski, Mark Raymond Alphonse |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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