Hall Effect Essay

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Hall Effect The Hall effect was discovered in 1879 by Edwin Herbert Hall at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Edwin discovered the Hall effect while working on his doctoral thesis in Physics. Hall’s experiments consisted of exposing thin gold leaf on a glass plate and tapping off the gold leaf at different points down the length of the material. He later expanded this to various other conducting materials but early on used only gold leaf. The effect that Hall achieved is a potential difference on opposite sides of the material called a Hall voltage. This voltage is created by applying a magnetic field perpendicular to the material being tested. The ratio of the voltage created to the amount of current produced is called the Hall resistance and is a characteristic of the material being used. Each material has its own Hall resistance. The Hall effect occurs due to the nature of the current in a conductor or semiconductor and allows a person to determine whether the charge carriers in the material are positively or negatively charged. Furthermore, the number of such carriers per unit volume of the conductor can also be measured accurately. When a magnetic field is present that is not parallel to the direction of motion of the moving charges these charges are subject to a force called the Lorentz force. When this magnetic field is absent or in parallel with the direction of motion the charges follow straight paths. If the magnetic field is perpendicular to the direction of motion the paths of the moving charges is curved. In this explanation it is assumed there are no impurities and the only charge carriers are electrons. As the electrons flow through the material on this curved path due to the perpendicular magnetic field the charges begin to build up along one side of the material. As the electrons build up on one side of the material an equal and
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