The exam topics
Physics 2
Electrostatics, capacitors, circuits, magnetic field, induction, alternating current, Maxwell’s equations, electromagnetic waves and optics.
Electric charge and Coulomb’s law
What electric charge is and what properties it has, how conductors and insulators are charged, how Coulomb's law and the superposition principle give the force between point charges in one and two dimensions, and when a system of charges is in equilibrium.
Electric field
How the electric field is defined, how it is computed for point charges, for the dipole and for continuous distributions such as the wire, the ring, the disk and the plane, how field lines describe it and how a charge moves in a uniform field.
Electric flux and Gauss’s law
What the flux of the electric field through a surface measures, why the outward flux through a closed surface depends only on the enclosed charge, how Gauss's law gives the field of distributions with spherical, cylindrical and planar symmetry, and what its local form is.
Electric potential and electrostatic energy
Why the electrostatic field is conservative, how potential energy and potential are defined, how the potential of point charges and continuous distributions is computed, how the field is obtained from the potential and how conservation of energy describes the motion of charges.
Conductors, capacitors and dielectrics
Why the interior field of a conductor in equilibrium is zero and the charge lies on the surface, how to compute the capacitance of parallel-plate, spherical and cylindrical capacitors and of their combinations, how much energy the electric field stores and how a dielectric changes capacitance, field and energy.
Electric current and DC circuits
What current and current density are, how Ohm's law and resistivity relate current and voltage, how much power a resistor dissipates, how to solve a circuit with real sources, resistors in series and in parallel and Kirchhoff's laws, and how capacitors charge and discharge in an RC circuit.
Magnetic field and Lorentz force
How a magnetic field acts on moving charges and on currents, from the Lorentz force to the circular and helical motion of particles, the velocity selector, the mass spectrometer and the Hall effect, up to the force on a wire and the torque on a loop, described by the magnetic moment.
Sources of the magnetic field
How currents produce the magnetic field, from the Biot-Savart law to the fields of wires, loops and arcs, the force between parallel wires and the definition of the ampere, up to Ampère's law with its applications to a wire, a coaxial cable, a solenoid and a toroid, the flux of the magnetic field and a brief look at magnetic materials.
Electromagnetic induction
How a change in the magnetic flux linked with a circuit generates an electromotive force, how to compute the emf of a moving rod and of a rotating loop, what inductance and the RL circuit are, and where the energy of the magnetic field resides.
Electrical oscillations and AC circuits
How the charge oscillates in an LC circuit and how the oscillations are damped in an RLC circuit, how resistors, capacitors and inductors respond to a sinusoidal voltage, how phasors and impedance give the current and the phase shift, what resonance and the power factor are, and how a transformer changes an alternating voltage.
Maxwell’s equations and electromagnetic waves
How the displacement current completes Ampère's law, what the four Maxwell equations are, why they imply waves that travel at the speed of light, and how much energy and momentum these waves carry.
Geometric and wave optics
How light is reflected and refracted according to Snell's laws, how mirrors and thin lenses form images, and how interference, diffraction and polarization reveal the wave nature of light.