Electrical conductivity

  • Typical range of conductivities for insulators, semiconductors, and conductors.

    Typical range of conductivities for insulators, semiconductors, and conductors.

  • Figure 18: Profiles of the quality factor (Q; see Table 2), viscosity, and electrical conductivity as functions of depth. The quality factor is determined for shear waves at frequencies of one to 100 hertz (periods of one to 0.01 second).


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high-pressure phenomena

Three compression mechanisms in crystals.
...environment entails considerable experimental difficulties, especially those associated with attaching leads to pressurized samples or detecting small signals from the experiment. Nevertheless, electric conductivities of numerous materials at high pressures have been documented. The principal classes of solids—insulators, semiconductors, metals, and superconductors—are...


acid-base solutions



The commonest metallic crystal structures.
Ordinarily, ceramics are poor conductors of electricity and therefore make excellent insulators. Nonconductivity arises from the lack of “free” electrons such as those found in metals. In ionically bonded ceramics, bonding electrons are accepted by the electronegative elements, such as oxygen, and donated by the electropositive elements, usually a metal. The result is that all...
Figure 1: Schematic diagram of a zirconia oxygen sensor used to monitor automobile exhaust gases. The sensor, approximately the size of a spark plug, is fitted into the exhaust manifold of an automobile engine. The thimble-shaped zirconia sensor, sandwiched between thin layers of porous platinum, is exposed on its interior to outside air and on its exterior to exhaust gas passing through slits in the sensor shield. The two platinum surfaces serve as electrodes, conducting a voltage across the zirconia that varies according to the difference in oxygen content between the exhaust gas and the outside air.
...ceramics resist the flow of electric current, and for this reason ceramic materials such as porcelain have traditionally been made into electric insulators. Some ceramics, however, are excellent conductors of electricity. Most of these conductors are advanced ceramics, modern materials whose properties are modified through precise control over their fabrication from powders into products....


Electrical conductivity σ is the inverse of resistivity and is measured in units of ohm-metre −1. Electrical current is produced by the motion of charges. In crystals, electrical current is due to the motion of both ions and electrons. Ions move by hopping occasionally from site to site; all solids can conduct electricity in this manner. When the voltage is zero, there is...


...substances discovered more recently possess many of the properties of ferromagnetic materials, including spontaneous magnetization and remanence. Unlike the ferromagnetic metals, they have low electric conductivity, however. In alternating magnetic fields, this greatly reduces the energy loss resulting from eddy currents. Since these losses rise with the frequency of the alternating field,...


Although most glasses contain charged metallic ions capable of carrying an electric current, the high viscosity of glass impedes their movements and electrical activity. Thus, glass is an efficient electrical insulator—though this property varies with viscosity, which in turn is a function of temperature. Indeed, the electrical conductivity of glass increases rapidly with temperature....

metallic glass

Figure 1: The state of atomic motion.
...(as discussed above in connection with Figure 3 and also below with regard to its value in technological settings), are noted here. The atomic-scale disorder present in a metallic glass causes its electrical conductivity to be lower than the conductivity of the corresponding crystalline metal, because the structural disorder impedes the motion of the mobile electrons that make up the...

physical metallurgy

The electrical conductivity of a metal (or its reciprocal, electrical resistivity) is determined by the ease of movement of electrons past the atoms under the influence of an electric field. This movement is particularly easy in copper, silver, gold, and aluminum—all of which are well-known conductors of electricity. The conductivity of a given metal is decreased by phenomena that...


Figure 1: Hexagonal lattice of atomic sites.
The electric properties of quasicrystals have proved to be rather unusual. Unlike their constituent elements, which tend to be good electrical conductors, quasicrystals conduct electricity poorly. For alloys of aluminum-copper-ruthenium these conductivities differ by as much as a factor of 100. As the perfection of the quasicrystalline order grows, the conductivity drops. Such behaviour is...

rare-earth elements

Y 2O 3 oxide is added to ZrO 2 to stabilize the cubic form of ZrO 2 and to introduce oxygen vacancies, which results in a material with a high electrical conductivity. These materials (5–8 percent Y 2O 3 in ZrO 2) are excellent oxygen sensors. They are used to determine the oxygen content in the air and to control the...


The electrical nature of a material is characterized by its conductivity (or, inversely, its resistivity) and its dielectric constant, and coefficients that indicate the rates of change of these with temperature, frequency at which measurement is made, and so on. For rocks with a range of chemical composition as well as variable physical properties of porosity and fluid content, the values of...

Saturn’s core


semiconductor materials

Typical range of conductivities for insulators, semiconductors, and conductors.
...commonly grouped into three classes: insulators, semiconductors, and conductors. (At low temperatures some conductors, semiconductors, and insulators may become superconductors.) Figure 1 shows the conductivities σ (and the corresponding resistivities ρ = 1/σ) that are associated with some important materials in each of the three classes. Insulators, such as fused quartz and...


Because silver has the highest electrical conductivity of all metals, it is used in alloyed form for electrical contacts. Palladium and nickel improve the metal’s chemical resistance to oxidation and sulfidation as well as its resistance to corrosion.

physical laws and properties


in solid-state physics, measurement of the ease with which a particular type of charged particle moves through a solid material under the influence of an electric field. Such particles are both pulled along by the electric field and periodically collide with atoms of the solid. This combination of electric field and collisions causes the particles to move with an average velocity, called the...

Ohm’s law

The proportionality constant σ J is the conductivity of the material. In a metallic conductor, the charge carriers are electrons and, under the influence of an external electric field, they acquire some average drift velocity in the direction opposite the field. In conductors of this variety, the drift velocity is limited by collisions, which heat the conductor.


3. In simple metals irradiation decreases conductivity for both heat and electricity. Conduction of both in metallic crystals is attributable to their ordered structure. The more perfect the structure, the better is the conduction. Frenkel defects, generated by irradiation, therefore decrease both conductivities. In extreme cases conductivity decrease of orders of magnitude has been observed....


Figure 10: The electrical resistivity (solid line) of copper at low temperature when there are 110 iron atoms per 1,000,000 copper atoms.
Conductivity is the reciprocal of resistivity, and it, too, characterizes materials on the basis of how well electric current flows in them. The metre-kilogram-second unit of conductivity is mho per metre, or ampere per volt-metre. Good electrical conductors have high conductivities and low resistivities. Good insulators, or dielectrics, have high resistivities and low conductivities....

salinity determination



Electrical conductivity involves a flow or current of free electrons through a solid body. Some materials, such as metals, are good conductors of electricity; these possess free or valence electrons that do not remain permanently associated with the atoms of a solid but instead form an electron “cloud” or gas around the peripheries of the atoms and are free to move through the solid...
electrical conductivity
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