Question

What's the difference between electric potential and electric potential energy? Really confused about this...

Answer 1

Ok.. lemme try and explain..

Have u understood what is the difference between electric FIELD and electric FORCE?.. force always ACTS on a charge..
so i can ask.. "hey how much force is acting on this 3 micro coulomb charge that i have kept here man?".. and you would say.. "hey thats 3N" .. i say "thank you mate"

now.. we agree, that there is an E field at that point.. and we define the E field as F/unit charge.. so by definition the E field over there is 3N/3micro C = a million N/C.. THIS IS E FIELD.. so i can say " hey at that point the E field is 1 million N/C"..

so u see field is something that is defined for every point in space.. every point u can assign a value. Force on the other hand is something that a charge EXPERIENCES.. so for FORCE u need a charge..



now we do the same with POtentials and potential energy. if we consider infinity as our zero reference.. then lets say i bring that 3 micro C charge from infinity all the way to that point. and it turns out i had to 300 J of work. then where did my work go? :O.. its stored in that charge as potential energy .. and i would now say, i have INCREASED to potential energy of that charge from 0 to 300, or it now possess a 300J of P.E.

now we define potential as work done/unit charge.. so in that case, the potential AT THAT POINT would be 300/3micro C = 100 million J/C or 100 million Volts. So i would say " hey the potential AT THAT POINT is 100 million VOlts."

the reason we talk in terms of fields and potentials is, if we know the values of these, then we can always find P.E for any charge and Forces acting on those charges

so E field is a vector field which tells how charges would experience forces and Potentials is a scalar field which tells how much energy charges would posses,

having the knowledge of these both, u COULD CALCULATE SOOOO MANY THINGS... AND U COULD RULEEEEEEEEE THIS UNIVERSEEEEEEEEEEEE>>>... MUHAHAHAHAHHAHAH!!!