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antonantal
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Why is it that the current in an ideal electric conductor resides in a very thin layer at the surface of the conductor?
lzkelley said:what makes an ideal conductor an ideal conductor is that there is an effectively infinite supply of electrons than can move perfectly freely.
That being the case, if there is ANY electric field whatsoever inside the conductor, the electrons will almost instantly move to cancel it out. Electrons can't, however, escape the physical boundaries of the conductor -> so they can accumulate and move along the outside.
Does that help?
rbj said:...at very high frequencies, virtually all of the current is at the cylinderical edge of the conductor...
antonantal said:The thing that got me confused was that in an ideal electric conductor the phenomenon occurs at any frequency.
But looking at the formula for the skin depth [tex]\delta = \sqrt{\frac{2}{\sigma\omega\mu}}[/tex] it can be seen that, for infinite conductivity, the skin depth is zero no matter what the frequency is.
I'm still confused about what would be the skin depth at DC in an ideal conductor (superconductor).
An ideal conductor is a material that allows for the flow of electrical current with zero resistance. This means that there is no loss of energy as the current passes through the material.
An ideal conductor is important in electrical circuits because it allows for the efficient transfer of electrical energy. Without any resistance, the current can flow freely through the conductor, minimizing any loss of energy.
In an ideal conductor, current is defined as the rate of flow of electric charge. This means that the amount of charge passing through a point in the conductor per unit time is constant.
The current in an ideal conductor is affected by the voltage applied to the conductor and the resistance of the circuit. A higher voltage will result in a higher current, while a higher resistance will decrease the current.
No, an ideal conductor does not exist in real life as all materials have some level of resistance. However, materials such as superconductors can come close to behaving like ideal conductors at extremely low temperatures.