Attenuation of the electric potential and field in disordered systems (Q2574160)

Experimentally, macroscopic systems containing a large number of positive and negative charges (like a salt solution) do not create large electric fields. This is due to global electroneutrality and to the fact that the charges of different sign are distributed in a random way in space. More formally, this paper studies the electric potential and electric field produced by spatially disordered distributions of charges, by means of simple probabilistic arguments. In one-dimensional systems, it is found that for reasonable, globally electroneutral models where on average there are as many \(+\) charges as \(-\) ones, the electric field and electric potential are finite with probability one and have finite variance. In \(2\)- and \(3\)-dimensional models, in contrast, the electric potential seen at a point has an infinite variance: large amounts of energy are needed to put together a typical configuration of charges. On the other hand, the electric field has a finite variance. The situation is very different for systems satisfying a constraint of local electroneutrality (for instance, a system of randomly located and oriented electric dipoles): in this case, it is found that the variance of electric field and electric potential are both finite, in all spatial dimensions \(d=1,2,3\).