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We address the electrostatic problem of a thin, curved, and cylindrical conductor a conducting filament and show that the corresponding linear charge density slowly tends to uniformity as the inverse of the logarithm of a characteristic parameter, which is the ratio of the diameter to the smaller of the length and minimum radius of curvature of the filament. An alternative derivation of this result based on energy minimization is given. These results follow from a general asymptotic analysis of the electric field components and potential near a charged filament in the limit of vanishing diameter. It is found that the divergent parts of the radial and azimuthal electric field components are determined by the local charge density, while the axial component is determined by the local dipole density. For a straight filament our results reduce to those known for conducting needles. For curved filaments, the configuration of charges and fields is no longer azimuthally symmetric, and there is an additional length scale arising from the finite radius of curvature of the filament. The basic uniformity result survives the added complications, which include an azimuthal variation in the surface charge density of the filament. As with the variations in linear charge density along the filament, the azimuthal variations vanish with the characteristic parameter, only more rapidly. These findings allow us to derive an asymptotic formula for the capacitance of a curved filament that generalizes a result first obtained by Maxwell. The examples of a straight filament with uniform and linearly varying charge densities and a circular filament with a uniform charge distribution are treated analytically and found to agree with the general analysis. Numerical calculations illustrating the slow convergence of linear charge distribution to uniformity for an elliptical filament are presented. An interactive computer program implementing and animating the numerical calculations is available.
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