Gauss's Law


Theory

The Divergence Theorem

Gauss's Law can be written in two different forms: integral and differential. To relate the two, we use the Divergence theorem.

Gauss's Law

Gauss's law for the electric field says that the electric flux through any closed surface is proportional to the amount of electric charge contained within that surface. Again let be some volume of space, and let be its surface. Then

where is the total charge contained in . We can write this in terms of the charge density as

so that Gauss's law becomes

where is a fundamental constant. You can look at a not-entirely rigorous proof.