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Readings
Activity 3, Potential Energy Diagrams of VQM Activities
Atkins Chapter 27
Homework
Atkins Chapter 27, page 555, Problems 4 and 5
Problems 1 & 2 Activity 1A, Potential Energy Diagrams, pages
1A-9 and 1A-10 of VQM Activities
Problem - Catching a Thief Activity 4, Potential Energy Diagrams,
pages 4-3 and 4-5 of VQM Activities
When you study properties of materials, you will find that many
objects have their motion restricted to a small region of space.
For example, electrons stay close to their atoms, and atoms in
a solid are restricted in their motion by their interaction with
other atoms. We say that these objects are trapped by their
interactions with neighboring objects. When you study trapped
electrons and atoms, you will use potential energy diagrams. To
become prepared you will now consider with potential energy diagrams
representing a car trapped by interactions with magnets.
You are already familiar with the attractive and repulsive situations, in which the car managed to escape the magnets and went all the way to the end of the track. In this activity, you will use conservation of energy and the total energy of the car to focus on another question: what conditions allow a car to be trapped in a region of space? You will start with a car initially repelled by one pair of magnets and later trapped between two pairs of magnets.
Keep in mind that in your experiments you use the magnets as
a convenient way of creating potential energy diagrams. However,
these diagrams can be created with other objects as well. For
example, the interactions between atoms and nuclei are of nonmagnetic
origin. In this unit, you will be concerned only with the shape
of the diagrams, not with the origin of interactions.
