The total work by the gas is the enclosed triangular area, . The positive heat on the sloping leg is
Add , excluding the emitting part of and all of . Hence
As an independent conservation of energy check, the heat emitted on late is and on is ; thus . Using only the net heat on would give an incorrect thermal efficiency.
The rod imposes a mechanical constraint, and its force is perpendicular to the wrecking ball's instantaneous velocity, so it does no work. In the constant parallel Newtonian gravitational field, the ball falls through the vertical distance . Conservation of energy between and therefore gives
and hence
Use and Gauss's law . The divergence theorem and the decay at infinity give
Multiplying by proves that the two expressions for the electrostatic energy agree.
The uniform volume charge density in the thick shell is
Spherical symmetry and the integral form of Gauss's law give
Thus is zero inside, rises continuously through the charged region, reaches at , and then decays as . Taking and integrating gives
The electric potential is continuous, constant inside, decreases smoothly across the charge, and continues as outside.
As , the charge becomes a surface shell. Then
The potential remains continuous, but the normal electric field jumps by across the surface charge density.
The field-energy expression gives
The charge-potential expression gives the same result directly because the entire charge lies where the potential equals :
This is the electrostatic energy of a uniformly charged spherical shell.
Since is proportional to ,
to first order. This is the work required to bring the additional charge from infinity to the potential created by the charge already present.
The work done along the trajectory is
By Newton's second law, , so
This is the work-energy theorem: the work equals the change in kinetic energy.
A force is conservative when its work between two points is independent of the path, equivalently when it is the negative gradient of a potential energy. Here a potential with is
Conservation of energy for gives
Thus
If , the particle escapes with asymptotic speed ; the graph decreases from to this horizontal asymptote. At the escape velocity , it decreases as and approaches zero only at infinity. If , it reaches the turning point
where , then returns on the negative branch of the same curve and oscillates symmetrically about the origin.
For oscillation put . One quarter of the period is
where . Therefore
The first part of is the change of the quadratic energy associated with the active Ornstein–Uhlenbeck force. The second is minus the change in the particle's potential energy, measured in thermal-noise units. The time integral is the work done by active propulsion, again divided by its noise scale; the full log ratio is the trajectory's time-reversal asymmetry or entropy production.
In a stationary confining state the two endpoint terms remain as and have zero mean, while the mean active work and the mean log ratio grow proportionally to . Endpoint-term distributions approach time-independent distributions with positive and negative fluctuations. Under mixing assumptions, the time-integrated work has a large-deviation distribution: its central part becomes approximately Gaussian with mean and variance proportional to , while its far tails scale exponentially in . The log-ratio distribution obeys the corresponding fluctuation theorem symmetry.
With an external force , the required forward and backward noise histories become
Repeating the difference of squares and using gives
The second term is times the work performed by the external force.
Consider a circular circumplanetary orbit well inside the Hill sphere, with dust speed and unit plane normal . During one dust orbital period, take the stellar direction and flux at the planet's stellar radius as constant. The velocity-dependent Poynting–Robertson drag has relative work
The constant terms have zero work over the closed circular orbit. Since ,
The coefficient is three for coplanar stellar and dust orbits; it is two for a dust plane normal to the instantaneous stellar direction. Averaging over a circular planetary year at fixed dust orbital inclination gives . Conservative perturbations must remain small enough for this circular-orbit average.
With constant, average the drag work over a bound elliptic orbit. Using gives the integral , where is the conservative central parameter. Combining with gives
This is a weak-drag secular average. It also holds when the conservative parameter is , provided a bound orbit exists; the conservative parameter cancels but the drag amplitude remains . For a circular Kepler orbit, .
Work-energy theorem Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
The net work on a particle equals its change in kinetic energy: