Two small spheres, each having a mass of 20g, are suspended from a common point by two insulating strings of length 40 cm each. The spheres are identically charged and the separation between the balls at equilibrium is found to be 4 cm. find the charge on each sphere.
Given,
Mass, ![]()
Length of strings, l = 40cm = 0.4 m
Distance between spheres, ![]()
Let the magnitude of Tension be T. Let the electric force between the spheres be Fe. Let the magnitude of charge on each pitch ball be q.

By trigonometry,
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At equilibrium, all forces must cancel out in accordance with newton’s first law. Hence,

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Formula used:
By Coulomb’s law, the electric force is given by:
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Where ϵ0 is the permittivity of free space
q1 and q2 are the magnitude of charges
r is the distance of separation between the charges
(Here,
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The magnitude of the electric force, Fe is given by:

From (2), we get,
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From (3) and (1), we get
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