This past week, thanks to Laughing Squid and other sources, a lot of people watched and were amazed by this simple demonstration of electromagnetism in action.
It is billed as the “world’s simplest electric train,” and it is almost certainly the case. Using only a battery, some strong magnets and some (bare) coiled copper wire, one can make the “train” travel numerous circuits through the copper “track,” until the battery is completely drained.
This caught my attention because it is a very clever twist on one of Michael Faraday’s original discoveries! Not electromagnetic induction, as I reflexively thought, but a homopolar motor. Below is an animation of such a motor that I whipped up in my office.
A simple homopolar motor.
A simple homopolar motor. Just in case you don’t believe it actually works, a longer video is here.
This particular homopolar motor design is ridiculously simple: a pair of neodymium magnets are stuck (by magnetic force only) to the bottom of an AA battery. A wire loop is balanced on the top of the battery, bent so that it touches the magnets on the bottom. When the connection is made, the wire will start to spin immediately, and will in general start spinning so fast that it will flip itself off of its perch. More sophisticated and stable designs exist, but this one is quick and showy.
So how does the homopolar motor work, and the “magneto-electric” train shown in the video? Both of them depend on the relationship between moving electric charges and magnetism, albeit in somewhat different ways.
Our story begins at the birth of what we now call “electromagnetism,” the beginning of a theory of nature that considers electricity and magnetism to be inextricably linked. It began in 1820, when the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted demonstrated that a magnetic compass needle can be deflected by an electric current, proving that moving electrical charges produce a magnetic field. Before this stunning experiment, it was generally assumed that electricity and magnetism were two completely separate physical phenomena.
What Oersted discovered, in essence, is that electricity flowing through a long straight wire creates a circulating magnetic field around it, as illustrated below.
A few of the magnetic field lines around an electrical current, I, in a really long wire.
A few of the magnetic field lines around an electrical current, I, in a really long wire.
For those unfamiliar with this graphical depiction of “fields,” I have written a “basics” post on the subject. One should picture these fields circulating around the wire at all heights and distances, being denser closer to the wire. Without going into too much detail how we know this, we note that the B-field represents a field of force that interacts with any permanent magnet brought nearby. Such a permanent magnet will tend to do two things in a magnetic field: it will rotate to line up its North Pole with the field lines, and it will be drawn into a region with a stronger field, i.e. denser collection of field lines.
The field lines circulate around an electrical current in a sense that can be determined by the “right-hand rule”: pointing the thumb of your right hand in the direction of the current, the field lines will circulate in a sense determined by your fingers.
We can use this right-hand rule to also describe the fields around a loop of circulating current; in such a case, the field lines appear roughly as shown below.
The field of a magnetic dipole.
The field of a magnetic dipole.
Once we’ve made a closed loop, the field lines are fundamentally different from the straight wire. The field lines of the long wire have a handedness — that is, they circulate around in a right-handed sense — but they do not have a “side” to them. The loop, however, has what we might call a “top” and a “bottom” or, more appropriately, a “North” and “South” pole. The North side of the loop is the side from which the field lines emanate, while the South side is the side into which the field lines pass. This loop has two poles, and is therefore referred to as a dipole.
This language of poles is suggestive of a regular bar magnet and the magnetic Earth, and that is of course the point — to a good approximation, a loop of current, the Earth, and a simple bar magnet all have a similar dipole field structure. For instance, here’s a sketch of the magnetic field of the Earth, with corresponding bar magnet superimposed.
The Earth as a gigantic bar magnet. Note that magnetic North (the magnet's South pole) is angled from the true North pole. (source)
The Earth as a gigantic bar magnet. Note that magnetic North (the magnet’s South pole) is angled from the true North pole. (source)
The takeaway lesson here is that a loop of current will behave pretty much the same as an ordinary permanent magnet; that is, North and South poles will attract, while North-North and South-South combinations will repel.
This immediately gives us a simp