- #1
antonantal
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- 20
Why is it that the current in an ideal electric conductor resides in a very thin layer at the surface of the conductor?
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?
...at very high frequencies, virtually all of the current is at the cylinderical edge of the conductor...
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).