Most of my answer goes beyond what's immediately useful to the problem; nonetheless, I hope it improves your understanding of electricity and maybe you'll find it fascinating ;)
sadgirl said:
Q 1.1) For the charges to flow down the circuit, is the potential energy converted to kinetic energy, or does it just flow down due to the difference in potential?
You're mostly right!
When you're talking about kinetic energy, you're probably thinking of a rolling ball or some other example from classical mechanics.
Actually, that is sort of what happens. As the electrons move "down" the electrical potential, they accelerate and pick up kinetic energy, much like a ball rolling down a hill.
Strangely, they never get very fast!
Why not?
Well, I was kind of lying. They're erratically moving around the metal at mind numbing speeds, bouncing around aimlessly.
(This will all make much more sense if you know that heat is a form of microscopic motion, a vibrating and bouncing around of atoms and molecules.)
One moment an electron moves left, the next moment it moves right, back and forth and up and down.
In the end though, it all cancels out!
They never get very fast
on average, moving fast and never getting anywhere.
What redirects them?
Collisions with the atoms.
It's as if that ball rolling down the hill was stuck in a pinball style maze of bouncy walls, moving very fast while hardly ever getting any further downhill.
On average, electrons actually drift so slowly in a conductor, that a snail could outpace them (no joke)! Because they are also extremely light (and slow), there is basically no "kinetic energy" in an electric current.
So where does the energy go if it's not making the electrons move from one place to the next?
Resistance!
Countless times a second, the electrons collide with the atoms that make up the metal; countless times a second, they transfer energy into the movement and vibrations of the material. In other words, they heat it up through resistance!
It's quite bizarre. The average snail-like drift velocity of electrons is about ## 10^{-3} \frac {m}{s}##, the random whizzing around they do because of heat is about ## 10^{5} \frac {m}{s}## and the velocity with which signals travel through it is ## 3*10^{-8} \frac {m}{s}## also know as the speed of light.
Crazy, right?
sadgirl said:
Also can the potential difference be seen as potential energy per unit charge?
Exactly right! 100%
That's what voltage is.
And for the charges (let's say negative charges) to go to the negative capacitor plate, the force must be applied along the whole way the charge travels right?
Interestingly enough, no.
Let's consider the analogy with the ball on the hill again.
The height of the ground is the potential.
However, the force required to push the ball isn't dependent on how high the ball is.
What is important is the steepness!
How fast does the height change with distance, that's what matters.
Going back to electricity, the height is the electrical potential and what matters for the force is the change in electrical potential over distance, the
electric field.
(You may have heard of that.)
It's like the steepness.
When you have a big voltage (electrical potential difference) between two close points, then the electric field is strong.
If the voltage is low *or* if the distance between the two points is large, then the electric field is weak.
When you're looking at a capacitor in real life, most if the electric field is actually concentrated close to the capacitor itself. So it's going to require quite a bit of force to get it off/on the capacitor, but moving along the wire far away from it is basically "effortless".
There's hardly any electric field so far out from the capacitor and so there also isn't much force you have to push against.
I hope this was more enlightening than confusing :P