Charge mosaics on contact-electrified dielectrics result from polarity-inverting discharges

Rewriting the textbooks for static electricity

26 December 2022

High-school textbooks will need to be rewritten following the discovery mosaics of positive and negative charges on surfaces gives rise to static electricity.

Rub a balloon against a wall and the static electricity that builds up will hold it in place. The standard textbook explanation for this is that one surface becomes positively charged while the other becomes negatively charged.

Growing evidence has suggested that this picture is too simplistic, and that both surfaces can sometimes have mosaics of positive and negative charges. But these mosaics were not considered to be a key aspect of static electricity.

Now, four researchers from the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea have shown that the sub-micrometre-scale patches are actually an inherent part of static electricity.

They also showed that sparks generate these patches because they flip the original charges on the surfaces rather than neutralize them.

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References

1. Nature Physics 18, 1347–1355 (2022). doi: 10.1038/s41567-022-01714-9