Demonstration of the lateral AC skin effect using a pickup coil

• Published in: American journal of physics Vol. 88; no. 8; pp. 676 - 684
• Main Authors: Blackwell, Anne E., Rotunno, Andrew P., Aubin, Seth
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Woodbury American Institute of Physics 01-08-2020
• Subjects: Experiments; Magnetic fields; Physics; Simulation; Skin diseases
• ISSN: 0002-9505; 1943-2909
• DOI: 10.1119/10.0001272

We present a simple demonstration of the skin effect by observing the current
distribution in a wide rectangular strip conductor driven at frequencies in the 0.25–5 kHz
range. We measure the amplitude and phase of the current distribution as a function of the
transverse position and find that they agree well with numerical simulations: The current
hugs the edges of the strip conductor with a significant variation in phase across the
width. The experimental setup is simple, uses standard undergraduate physics instructional
laboratory equipment, and is easy to implement as a short in-class demonstration. Our
study is motivated by modeling ac magnetic near fields in the vicinity of a rectangular
trace on an atom chip.