Overflatefeltet

Overflatefeltet, translated as the surface field, is a concept used across several disciplines to describe a field that is defined at or concentrated near a boundary surface between media or at the surface of a material. In physics, it refers to the portion of a vector field that interacts with or resides on an interface, often used to describe how charges, currents, or potentials behave at boundaries. This includes the way boundary conditions link surface quantities to changes in the normal or tangential components of electric and magnetic fields.

In electromagnetism, interfaces between dielectrics or conductors can support surface charges or currents, which produce discontinuities in field components across the boundary. Surface charge density relates to jumps in the normal component of the electric displacement field, while surface current density influences the tangential magnetic field. The concept of a surface field helps model how the field behaves specifically at the boundary, apart from the bulk field in the surrounding media.

In semiconductor physics, the surface field effect describes the electrostatic field at the surface that modulates carrier density in a thin surface layer, affecting device conductivity. This is a central idea in the operation of field-effect transistors and related technologies. The term is also used in geophysics to refer to the portion of a measured field observed at the Earth’s surface, arising from subsurface sources, and in measurement science to denote methods for characterizing surface-bound fields, such as surface potential or surface magnetism.