Use pressure with the ambient hydrostatic pressure removed, and let be the pressure below the falling sphere minus that above it. Away from the sphere the tube flow is Hagen-Poiseuille flow. The upper and lower clear lengths add to to leading order in , so their pressure drops add:
The large exterior reservoir returns this flux with negligible pressure loss compared with the long narrow tube. The sphere is assumed far enough from the ends that entrance effects and its occupied length give only lower-order corrections.
Now use a frame translating downwards with the sphere, and take positive upwards from its center. The sphere is stationary and the tube wall moves upwards with speed . The narrow gap is
It has axial length scale , making lubrication theory appropriate. The sphere-frame flux in a tube is constant: the upward relative flux through the whole section is , so its flux per unit circumference is
With on the sphere and on the wall, Couette-Poiseuille flow in a thin gap gives
Since , the pressure-jump relation is
The parabolic inner gap can be extended to infinite because these integrals are dominated by . The lubrication resistance integrals for a nearly occluding sphere are
Setting evaluates , , , hence
For the force, enclose the fluid between sections just above and below the sphere, including the annular layer. The net upward pressure force is . The tube wall exerts upward shear traction on this fluid; the sphere exerts a downward force equal to the upward hydrodynamic force on itself. From the gap solution,
The axial control volume force balance therefore gives the control-volume drag formula for a sphere in a tube:
Using a control volume avoids having to integrate the curved-sphere normal pressure and tangential shear separately.
With , , , , and , the three flux/pressure equations become
Solving these linear relations gives
The force relation is . Substitution first yields
Because and , the terms and are lower order than . Keeping the uniformly relevant leading terms gives
The squared is essential; replacing it by would give the wrong sign and scaling. This establishes the three drag regimes for a nearly occluding sphere.
For ,
The sphere nearly carries the tube's fluid down with it: the far-field flux is close to the piston displacement rate. The relative annular leakage is small in total volume, and the dominant force comes from the local annular shear term. The pressure force associated with the overall tube resistance is smaller.
For ,
The flow remains approximately piston-like, but the dominant force is now the pressure needed to drive Hagen-Poiseuille flow through the long clear tube. Both displayed terms in are retained because their relative size changes inside this regime without producing an additional leading drag regime.
For ,
The large tube resistance makes its net through-flow negligible. The sphere's displaced fluid instead passes upwards relative to it through the thin annular gap, with gap velocity of order . Its pressure drop and resulting pressure force dominate.
Finally consider two identical co-moving spheres, with nonoverlapping lubrication regions and the same total clear-tube length to leading order. The common through-flux is not doubled. In the middle regime it is still approximately , so the same total tube pressure drop is shared equally between the two identical spheres. The load sharing between co-moving spheres in a tube gives half the single-sphere force on each sphere in regime (ii). In regime (i), drag is set locally by the nearly pressure-balanced annular shear and is unchanged on each sphere. In regime (iii), each sphere must pass essentially its own displacement flux through its annular gap, giving the same local pressure drag as before; adding another pressure jump changes the already small tube flux but not either leading drag. The force is unchanged in regimes (i) and (iii).
The work done by a force is . By the work-energy theorem, this has the same physical dimension as energy. Thus
Although torque and energy have the same physical dimension, they represent different physical quantities.
The torque about an origin is . A cross product multiplies the dimensions of its factors, so torque has the physical dimension of length times force:
Use Coulomb's law in vacuum, . The constant is dimensionless, so the vacuum-permittivity dimension is
Thus the physical dimension of vacuum permittivity follows directly from the dimensions of electric charge, force, and separation.
An electric field is defined through the electric force on a stationary electric charge: . Therefore the electric-field dimension is
Work in one fixed inertial frame, and take positive velocity in the rocket's direction. During , the rocket ejects the positive amount of mass . Its exhaust has inertial velocity , by the Galilean transformation of velocities. Once expelled, that material retains its velocity because it experiences no external force. The system's momentum is therefore the rocket momentum plus the sum of all these exhaust momenta:
The minus sign comes from the positive expelled mass being .
Differentiate, applying the product rule to the rocket momentum and the fundamental theorem of calculus to the integral:
The momentum conservation law thus gives the nonrelativistic rocket equation
The same bookkeeping for kinetic energy gives
Its derivative is
where the rocket equation cancels the first two terms. Thus kinetic energy increases during mass ejection, with when and . This does not violate conservation of energy: the increase comes from stored internal energy.
The force on the real line charge is due to the induced conductor field, represented by the image charge; its own singular field must be omitted. The opposite image at distance produces at the origin a field toward the conductor,
Multiplying by the charge per unit length gives the attractive force per unit length:
The attraction holds for either sign of . The geometry assumes , so the real line lies outside the conductor.
Use the Minkowski metric with signature , and write . The Euler-Lagrange equation is
For the static phi-four kink, and , so the field equation is satisfied. The centre is arbitrary by translation invariance, and the hyperbolic tangent profile increases monotonically from to , crossing zero at . The static kink and its endpoint topological charge are
Figure 1.
The phi-four kink rises between the two vacuum values and crosses zero at its centre
.
Both endpoint values are isolated classical vacua, since only at . A continuous finite-energy deformation preserving the vacuum boundary conditions cannot change either endpoint to the other isolated classical vacuum. The topological charge is therefore unchanged: this kink cannot deform into a homogeneous classical vacuum, whose charge is zero. There is also a direct Bogomolny bound in this sector. The square completion for a one-dimensional kink gives
The phi-four kink saturates the bound, so its mass is in these units and it minimizes the energy within its topological sector. Its arbitrary position is a collective coordinate, not an instability. A kink and an antikink together have total charge zero and can annihilate without contradicting the protection of an isolated kink.
For the momentum, the canonical stress-energy tensor of this scalar field is
Consequently the physical spatial momentum density and the spatial momentum flux are
The sign of makes a right-moving translated kink carry positive momentum. Direct use of the field equation, rather than an assumed static field, yields the scalar-field momentum flux identity
The finite-energy field configuration has by . Integrating the stress-energy conservation law over the left half-line gives the boundary force
Under the usual vacuum falloff, the stress at the left endpoint is zero. More generally, smooth spatial cutoffs with derivative of order remove the left endpoint using the integrable energy density, so no pointwise limit of every derivative at infinity is needed. The identity expresses the force on the field to the left of : positive force transfers momentum to the right. For well separated solitons, a cut between them measures the interaction force on the left soliton.
Take that cut at . The specified symmetric pair has, at the initial time,
The printed field profile does not itself specify the initial velocity. If , the exact initial half-line force is
For the intended initially resting pair, or more generally , put and use . The at-rest force for a symmetric phi-four pair is
The leading force is attractive, towards the antikink:
The antikink feels the opposite force by the symmetry of the resting pair. This is an initial, large-separation interaction calculation, not a claim that the superposed profile is an exact static two-soliton solution. Without the initial-velocity condition, the additional momentum flux above prevents a unique force from being inferred from the printed profile alone.
A central force has no component in the angular direction. The angular component of the acceleration in polar coordinates therefore gives , or
For unit mass, is the signed angular momentum perpendicular to the orbital plane, so its magnitude is conserved. Equivalently, the torque vanishes, which also fixes that plane.
The given potential energy is , whose radial force is : positive is repulsive and negative attractive. The kinetic energy in polar coordinates is , so conservation of energy gives
For and , the effective potential is positive, strictly decreasing from to , and has no stationary point. For , it still tends to at zero, crosses zero at , and has its unique minimum at
It then approaches zero from below. The minimum corresponds to a stable circular orbit. If , the centrifugal barrier disappears; the attractive effective potential is simply and has no minimum.
Figure 1. . Effective potentials with unit angular momentum and k equal to plus or minus one. The attractive minimum and zero are marked.
The rotating-frame derivative formula is . Applying it twice to the position vector, with constant angular velocity, gives
Solving for identifies the displayed terms: its left side is the acceleration relative to the rotating reference frame, the first right-hand term is the inertial acceleration, is the Coriolis acceleration, and is the outward centrifugal acceleration.
For a particle of mass , replace by the actual force divided by using Newton's second law. The remaining terms then appear as apparent forces in . There is no Euler acceleration because is constant and no translational acceleration term because the common origin is fixed in the inertial frame.
Because the contact is frictionless, the horizontal normal force is , with a signed outward component. Any vertical contact component balances Newtonian gravity and does not enter the horizontal equations. With , the rotating reference frame equation gives
Since , , and , its normal and tangential components are
Hence the requested horizontal force vector is
Its magnitude is the absolute value of the scalar coefficient. That coefficient need not always be negative: the constraint can exert either sign of normal force, depending on the bead's relative velocity. The tangential equation, which does not contain the reaction, is .
Assume the particle masses are fixed and their total mass is positive. The centre of mass and the relative position vectors are
Their weighted sum is zero, so differentiation gives . Expanding the kinetic energy with makes the mixed term vanish:
This kinetic-energy decomposition about the centre of mass separates translation from internal motion without assuming any particular force law.
For the rigid body, its relative velocity is . The cross product identity for a unit vector gives , the squared perpendicular distance to the rotation axis. Hence the moment of inertia of the particle is , and summing the rotational kinetic energy yields
Let , and . A tightly bound circumplanetary orbit lies well inside the Hill sphere, so and its orbital period is short compared with the planet's year. Treat the stellar flux and stellar direction as constant during one dust orbit. With stellar-frame velocity , the velocity-dependent acceleration is
The terms independent of , including the leading static radiation pressure, do no net work on an unperturbed closed circular orbit. Hence
For a coplanar circular orbit, and the component along the stellar direction has mean square . Thus yields the Poynting–Robertson decay of a circumplanetary orbit
The coefficient three assumes coplanarity, which the PDF does not state. For orbital normal , the general circular covariance is , giving
An orbital plane normal to the stellar radial direction has coefficient two during that orbit, a counterexample to an orientation-independent coefficient three. Averaging also over the planet's circular stellar orbit, with fixed dust-plane orbital inclination to it, gives coefficient . The conservative forces must be weak enough for the assumed approximately circular, planet-bound orbit to persist; the small planet-to-star mass ratio alone does not ensure this for arbitrary grain .