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Commonly used terms in the Electrical industry.
dielectric
(1) a medium that exhibits negligible or no electrical conductivity and thus acts as a good electrical insulator.
(2) a medium characterized by zero conductivity, unity relative permeability, and a relative permittivity greater than one. Also known as an insulator.
dielectric constant
(1) a quantity that describes how a material stores and dissipates electrical energy.
(2) ratio of the electrical capacity of a condenser, which has a given material as the dielectric, to the capacity of an identical condenser, but with air as the dielectric.
(3) permittivity of a medium normalized to the permittivity of free space; a measure of the response of a dielectric to an applied electric field.
(4) an electric property of an insulator or semi-conducting material, which describes how differently electric fields will behave inside of the material as compared to air. As an example, e
r
= 12.9 for GaAs as compared to e
r
= 1 for air. In integrated circuits, an effective dielectric constant (e
eff
) is used, since the electric fields supported by the signals traveling through the conductors on the circuit flow through both air and the insulator or semiconductor simultaneously.