The solution at revision #20646 of , by Valter. This is not the current version.

Statement

6.5.3. What are the surface charge density and the electrostatic pressure at the boundary between two fields with magnitudes and ? What about and ? In the second case, the surface charge density is three times larger. Why then is the electrostatic pressure the same in both cases?

Solution

Let us write the boundary condition for the normal components of the electric displacement field:

where is the free surface charge density at the boundary.
Since , for the first case (, ) we have:

To find the pressure, consider a thin cylindrical shell at the boundary of the two media. Let us isolate a small portion of the surface with charge . Let the field generated by this specific portion be , and the field generated by all other charges in the system (the external field) be .
From the superposition principle, the total fields on either side of the boundary are:


By adding these two equations, we can find the external field :

The total force acting on this portion is:

Thus, the electrostatic pressure at the interface is:

Similarly, for the second case (, ), we have:

The external field in this case is:

And the pressure is:

Why is the pressure the same?
We can obtain a general formula for the pressure using analogous reasoning. By substituting and :

From this final equation, we see that the electrostatic pressure depends on the squares of the electric fields. Therefore, changing the sign of leaves the pressure unchanged.

Answer

a) ;

b) ;