Concise presentation of the Coulomb electrostatic potential of a uniformly charged cube

Abstract

We use a novel method to calculate in closed form the Coulomb electrostatic potential created by a uniformly charged cube at an arbitrary point in space. We apply a suitable transformation of variables that allows us to obtain a simple presentation of the electrostatic potential in one-dimensional integral form. The final concise closed form expression of the Coulomb electrostatic potential of the uniformly charged cube is obtained after completing the calculation of the resulting one-dimensional integrals. Such integrals consist of combinations of products of error functions and power functions that can be solved exactly despite their intimidating appearance. The exact analytic formula for the Coulomb electrostatic potential that we derive reflects the symmetry of the cube and is easy to implement. We illustrate its use by calculating the exact values of the electrostatic potential at some points of symmetry such as the center of cube, center of face of cube, center of edge of cube and corner of cube.