The inner workings of a capacitor

June 7, 2005
Abstract This article describes how a capacitor works, and how current ows in the presence of a capacitor. It is not aimed to teach you how to solve capacitor circuit problems, just to give you an intuitive understanding of how a capacitor works.

Some people have the impression that charge ows through a capacitor. This is not the case under normal operation! However, we still have the charge on one side of the capacitor equal to the charge on the other. This would lead some to conclude that the charge must be owing through the gap, which is incorrect. In this article, I describe how a capacitor works, and how this is consistent with no charge ow through the gap. So let us consider what happens to a capacitor under normal operation. We start with an uncharged capacitor:

Now, the uncharged is a little misleading. A capacitor is made of atoms with protons and electrons, so really it is the net charge that is zero. A more realistic picture is
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

+ + + + + +

The charges on the plates are shown, and are oriented more or less randomly. The wires have been given a nite diameter so that we can see the charges owing along them. 1

+ +

So consider what happens when I connect a battery. The circuit will be C R

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I am just going to draw the capacitor in future, you should remember that the left-hand side is connected directly to the positive terminal of the battery, and the right-hand side is connected to the negative terminal of the battery. What happens to the plate on the right-hand side is easy, as electrons ow from the negative terminal and build up on the plate. This is shown below (green ve signs represent electrons)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

To positive terminal

+ +

The plate on the right has a net negative charge. But we know from our experiments that the light will turn on if we plug it into the left hand side of the capacitor, so we must have current owing through the other side as well. To see why, remember that the left hand side is connected to the positive terminal of the battery. As the terminal is positive, it attracts some of the electrons already on the neutral plate, and those electrons are free to move:
To positive terminal
+ + + + + + + +

What is the net result of all of this? No charge ows through the gap itself, but the same current ows on both the left and right hand sides of the capacitor.

+ +

Electrons going to positive terminal

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+ + +

From neg. terminal

+ + + +
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Electrons from negative terminal

From neg. terminal

+ + + +
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Electrons from negative terminal

 The right plate is negatively charged, due to excess charge it picks up from the battery. The left hand plate is positively charged, due to losing charge to the battery. IMPORTANT! I have drawn the electrons collecting on one plate and getting pulled o the other separately for ease of explanation. It is important to realise that both are occurring at the same time, and that the currents on either side of the capacitor are indeed equal. Of course, as you charge a capacitor you make it harder to put more charges on. On the right hand side, the increasing number of electrons are repelling the new electrons coming in, and eventually the battery will not be able to push hard enough to overcome the repulsion of the electrons on the plate. On the right hand side, the more electrons we loose the greater the net positive charge on the left hand plate. This attracts the electrons it has left more and more, and eventually the pull from the positive plates is as strong as that of the battery. At this point, the charge ceases to ow. In fact, we have an expression for this already. Recall that the thing that pushes charges around is a change in voltage? Well, a capacitor pushing charges means it also has a change in voltage across it due to the charges built up on the plates.The amount of push that a capacitor exerts is the voltage drop across it is given by V = q C (1)

where q is the charge on the positive plate (and q is the charge on the negative plate). (You may wonder what happens if I run out of charges on the left-hand side. Well, the answer is that in principle it could happen, but by then the capacitor would have ripped itself apart from the plates attracting one another. The number of charges on a plate are huge, my picture is an enormous exaggeration of the imbalance between positive and negative charges.) Finally, it should be noted that although I wrote (1) solving for the voltage drop across the capacitor, it really serves as the denition of a capacitor. The

capacitance of an object is how much charge an object can hold for every volt between the plates, i.e. q C= . V In less formal terms, it is how much can be stored (charge) by a given push (voltage). Compare this to the similar statement for resistors V = IR (2)

which really denes the resistance R = V /I as the amount of push it takes (voltage) for a given amount of stu to ow (current). The reason equations (1) and (2) are useful is that the capacitance and resistance are usually constant over a large range of voltages, so we usually know R and C.