dielectric

Electrically poorly conducting or non-conducting, non-metallic substance in which charge carriers are generally not free to move

EntityQ184996

Also known as dielectric medium

Subclass of: chemical substance

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

In electromagnetism, a dielectric is an electrical insulator that can be polarised by an applied electric field. When a dielectric material is placed in an electric field, electric charges do not flow through the material as they do in an electrical conductor, because they have no loosely bound, or free, electrons that may drift through the material, but instead they shift, only slightly, from their average equilibrium positions, causing dielectric polarisation. Because of dielectric polarisation, positive charges are displaced in the direction of the field and negative charges shift in the direction opposite to the field. This creates an internal electric field that reduces the overall field within the dielectric itself. If a dielectric is composed of weakly bonded molecules, those molecules not only become polarised, but also reorient so that their symmetry axes align to the field.

Overview

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45 statements · 24% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Different from: relative permittivity

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36 identifiers linking dielectric across the web's reference databases

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statements

24%

externally sourced

Source last edited September 10, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). dielectric (Q184996). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/dielectric-Q184996