Millikan condenser

The classical electrostatic balance is the Millikan condenser, which was first used to measure the charge on the electron in the famous Millikan oil-drop experiment. In principle, the device can be used to levitate a small charged mass by using the electrical field generated by two flat plates to... 

The electrodynamic balance or quadrupole began with the electric mass filter of Paul and Raether (1955), who demonstrated that a charged mass can be stably levitated by means of a quadrupole arrangement of electrodes, one of the simplest configurations being that shown in Fig. 3. An ac potential is applied to the rods in the horizontal plane, and a dc potential is applied to the upper and lower rods as in the Millikan condenser. The ac field has horizontal and vertical components that are 180° out of phase, thereby... 

A number of investigators attempted to verify the Rayleigh limit using Millikan condensers and quadrupoles (Doyle et ai, 1964 Abbas and Latham, 1967 Berg et al., 1970), but these studies were not sufficiently precise because... 

Fig. 11. A photophoretic spectrum of a CdS crystallite obtained by Arnold and Amani (1980) with a modified Millikan condenser. Reprinted with permission from Arnold, S., and Amani, Y., Optics Letters 5, 242-244, Copyright 1980, The Optical Society of America.

Fig. 8.—Condenser in Millikan s method of determining the elementary charge e. The weight Mg is compensated by an electric field E.

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