“A dipole in a dielectric”, a familiar statement to say the least! It was not the mention of dipole that persuaded me to include this article in my portfolio, but the conflicting results attained by two seemingly “correct” methods of determining the dipole moment. I can’t say that I enjoy conflict, in fact I don’t. I do however realize that many of the giant leaps in physics materialized do to inconsistantcies in what was once accepted as true. In these instances many basic truths needed to be modified to explain the disagreement. Could this be the beginning of something big?

Consider a dipole consisting of only +q and –q a distance “d” apart. If we let dà0 then we have a point dipole p0. If we are located in a linear dielectric gauss’ law becomes = q. The medium is not a vacuum and the charges in the dielectric can be taken into consideration in the form . Likewise the dipole takes shape as .

The oblate case begins with some parameters m>0, 0Z.

This is the standard text book solution. Using this information the potential is found to be

Some topics in this essay:
, Oblate Prolate, dipole moment, method 2, charges dielectric, moment method 2, dipole moment method, using uniformly polarized, text book solution, potential inside sphere, moment method, vacuum cavity, method 1, book solution, text book, boundary conditions, oblate prolate,