Coulomb's Law describes the electrostatic interaction between charged particles. It states that the force between two charges is directly proportional to the product of the magnitude of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.For potential energy, the formula is similar:
- Coulomb's constant, is approximately .
- and represent the charges of the interacting particles.
- is the distance between the centers of the two charges.
In our case, you have the alpha particle and a lead nucleus. When these two get close, they exert significant forces on each other, and as they do so, they also have potential energy between them, calculated using this formula.