Trajectories of a collection of charged particles in a transverse magnetic field

Abstract

An ensemble of identically charged particles is distributed around the origin as vertices of a regular polygon. The resulting trajectories due to the Coulomb repulsion are curved by a perpendicular magnetic field. Two cases were considered. In the first case, the charges of each particle is Q while in the second case, the total charge Q is divided among the N particles. The trajectory for the case N = 4 was plotted. It was found that for both cases, the maximum radial distance attained by the charges increases as the number of particles increases.