Numerical answer
A wire carries a steady current along a closed path made of two semicircular arcs of radii and , both centred at the same point and lying on opposite sides of a line through , joined by two straight radial segments along that line. The current circulates so that the fields of the two arcs at point the same way. Taking , the magnetic field at (in ) is. Give the answer correct to two decimal places.
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Answer: 23.56
Use the Biot–Savart law piece by piece. The two straight segments lie along radial lines through , so and they contribute nothing. A semicircular arc of radius carrying current gives, at its centre, half the field of a full loop: . The problem states the two arcs' fields add. Hence . That is . A common slip is to use the full-loop formula , which doubles the result, or to subtract the two fields. Direction matters only for the sign: if the arcs opposed one another, the field would be the difference of the two terms.
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