We use a tablet to determine experimentally the dependencies of the magnetic field (B) on the electrical current and on the axial distance from a coil (z). Our data shows a good precision on the inverse cubic dependence of the magnetic field on the axial distance, B ∝ z −3 . We obtain with good accuracy the value of air permeability µair. We also observe the same dependence of B on z when considering a magnet instead of a coil. Although our estimates are obtained through simple data fits, we also perform a more sophisticated error analysis, confirming the result for µair.
PACS numbers:The use of tablets and smartphone in science education expands possibilities for approaches that motivate students to understand better several physical phenomena [1][2][3][4]. In particular, tablets were shown as good tools to measure magnetostatic responses in current-carrying wires. This interesting work is about magnetic field sensoring [1]. It reports a simple way of obtaining experimentally the linear dependence between the magnetic field B and the number of turns N in the current-carrying coil using an "app" for iPad [5]. However, additional dependences of B are still not discussed, some of which we show in this paper leading to a wider description of this kind of system.We determine the dependencies of B on the electric current I and on the axial distance z in a coil, in suitably conditions using an iPad and the same free app MagnetMeter [5] (we suggest a similar app for Android [6]). We also perform the similar experiments with a small magnet instead of a coil. For the coil, we also make a good estimate for the magnetic permeability of the air µ air ∼ = µ 0 ≡ 4π × 10 −6 Hm −1 . The demonstration set used is composed by an electrical circuit, a ruler and a book. The circuit is formed by the following components, all of them connected in series: a wirewound potentiometer with resistance up to 30Ω; a resistor with 10Ω; an electrical source from a cell phone (max. output current ∼ 0.9A); a digital multimeter and a coil (internal diameter 2R i = 1.91 cm and external diameter 2R e = 2.42 cm and N = 62 turns).