Electric-field screening

Damping of electric fields

In physics, screening is the damping of electric fields caused by the presence of mobile charge carriers. It is an important part of the behavior of charge-carrying mediums, such as ionized gases (classical plasmas), electrolytes, and electronic conductors (semiconductors, metals). In a fluid, with a given permittivity ε, composed of electrically charged constituent particles, each pair of particles (with charges q1 and q2) interact through the Coulomb force as F = q 1 q 2 4 π ε | r | 2 r ^ , {\displaystyle \mathbf {F} ={\frac {q_{1}q_{2}}{4\pi \varepsilon \left|\mathbf {r} \right|^{2}}}{\hat {\mathbf {r} }},} where the vector r is the relative position between the charges.

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