milikan oil drop

[ilovemedi]

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saw this similar to another post and was confused:
on this website http://www.fi.edu/learn/case-files/millikan/oil.html it says "the centimeter of travel path for the oil drop was obtained from 22 cm diameter plates positioned 16 mm apart and the strength of the applied charge was about 6,000 volts per cm."

so is it a better experiment if the width of the capcitator plates is be larger than the height between the plates (distance between them)??

 

[sciencebooks]

saw this similar to another post and was confused:
on this website http://www.fi.edu/learn/case-files/millikan/oil.html it says "the centimeter of travel path for the oil drop was obtained from 22 cm diameter plates positioned 16 mm apart and the strength of the applied charge was about 6,000 volts per cm."

so is it a better experiment if the width of the capcitator plates is be larger than the height between the plates (distance between them)??

I'm not exceptionally familiar with this experiment, but I do know that it is used to suspend a negatively charged particular in between two plates.

Thus capacitance comes into play (with the top plate being positive and the bottom plate being negative). Capacitance = εo x A / d. Therefore, it is directly proportional to A and inversely proportional to d. So I'm not sure if it's so much that the width of the capacitors has to be bigger than the distance between the plates as it is a matter of proportionality (a big area is good, a small distance is good).