A laboratory experiment to demonstrate Gauss’s law for electric fields

This paper describes an experiment that demonstrates Gauss’s law for electric fields. The experiment utilizes easily obtained equipment and requires simple electrostatic field measurements. The field measurements are obtained for azimuthally symmetric electrodes located over a conducting ground plane. The measurements are shown to be consistent with the image theory solution for a spherical electrode over a ground plane. The relation between Gauss’s law and the concept of capacitance is also demonstrated.