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The electroscope is an early scientific instrument used to detect the presence of electric charge on a body. It detects charge by the movement of a test object due to the Coulomb electrostatic force on it. The amount of charge on an object is proportional to its voltage. The accumulation of enough charge to detect with an electroscope requires hundreds or thousands of volts, so electroscopes are used with high voltage sources such as static electricity and electrostatic machines. An electroscope can only give a rough indication of the quantity of charge; an instrument that measures electric charge quantitatively is called an electrometer. The electroscope was the first electrical measuring instrument. The first electroscope was a pivoted needle (called the versorium), invented by British physician William Gilbert around 1600. The pith-ball electroscope and the gold-leaf electroscope are two classical types of electroscope that are still used in physics education to demonstrate the principles of electrostatics. A type of electroscope is also used in the quartz fiber radiation dosimeter. Electroscopes were used by the Austrian scientist Victor Hess in the discovery of cosmic rays. In 1731, Stephen Gray used a simple hanging thread, which would be attracted to any nearby charged object. This was the first improvement on Gilbert's versorium from 1600. The pith-ball electroscope, invented by British schoolmaster and physicist John Canton in 1754, consists of one or two small balls of a lightweight nonconductive substance, originally a spongy plant material called pith, suspended by silk or linen thread from the hook of an insulated stand. Tiberius Cavallo made an electroscope in 1770 with pith balls at the end of silver wires. Modern electroscopes usually use balls made of plastic. In order to test the presence of a charge on an object, the object is brought near to the uncharged pith ball. If the object is charged, the ball will be attracted to it and move toward it. The attraction occurs because of induced polarization of the atoms inside the pith ball.

Charge extraction via graded doping of hole transport layers gives highly luminescent and stable metal halide perovskite devices

Michael Graetzel, Mohammad Ibrahim Dar, Mojtaba Abdi Jalebi, Zahra Andaji Garmaroudi

One source of instability in perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is interfacial defects, particularly those that exist between the perovskite and the hole transport layer (HTL). We demonstrate that thermally evaporated dopant-free tetra-cene (120 nm) on top of t ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)2019

Can a Metal Surface Repel Electric Charges?

Primoz Rebernik Ribic

We show that the interaction between a surface and a charge packet moving parallel to it can become repulsive above a critical relativistic energy. We find that this is true for a lossless dielectric surface and also for a Drude metallic surface-in apparen ...

American Physical Society2012