A closed form for the electrostatic interaction between two rod-like charged objects

TL;DR

This paper derives a closed-form formula for the electrostatic interaction between two arbitrarily oriented rod-like charged objects and explores their thermodynamic properties, including specific heat behavior at different separations.

Contribution

It provides the first explicit closed-form expression for the electrostatic interaction energy of two oriented rod-like charges in three dimensions.

Findings

Minimum interaction energy occurs at specific angles for close separations.

The specific heat of the system exhibits a maximum for separations less than 0.8 times the rod length.

The thermodynamic properties depend on separation distance and temperature, revealing phase-like behavior.

Abstract

We have calculated the electrostatic interaction between two rod-like charged objects with arbitrary orientations in three dimensions. we obtained a closed form formula expressing the interaction energy in terms of the separation distance between the centers of the two rod-like objects, $r$, their lengths (denoted by $2l_1$ and $2l_2$), and their relative orientations (indicated by $\theta$ and $\phi$). When the objects have the same length ($2l_1=2l_2=l$), for particular values of separations, i.e for $r\leq0.8 l$, two types of minimum are appeared in the interaction energy with respect to $\theta$. By employing the closed form formula and introducing a scaled temperature $t$, we have also studied the thermodynamic properties of a one dimensional system of rod-like charged objects. For different separation distances, the dependence of the specific heat of the system to the scaled temperature has been studied. It is found that for $r<0.8 l$, the specific heat has a maximum.