Q.Define current sensitivity. State the factors which increase the current sensitivity of a galvanometer.

Moving Coil Galvanometer: From Intuition to Formula

Imagine you have a tiny, lightweight coil of wire, suspended so it can rotate freely. If you pass a current through it, that coil becomes an electromagnet. Now place it between the poles of a strong permanent magnet. The coil will try to twist — it experiences a torque. The bigger the current, the harder it twists. That is the entire physical idea behind a moving coil galvanometer: use a current to produce a rotation, and measure the rotation to know the current.

But a freely spinning coil would just keep turning. To get a useful measurement, you need something that opposes that rotation — a restoring force that grows as the coil turns further. That is the job of a spring (usually a fine phosphor-bronze strip called a torsion fibre). The spring twists as the coil rotates, producing a restoring torque that exactly balances the magnetic torque at some angle. That equilibrium angle is your reading.

The Radial Magnetic Field — The Key Trick

Here is the clever part. If the magnetic field were uniform and the coil rotated out of alignment, the torque would change with angle — making the scale non-linear. To avoid that, the poles of the magnet are shaped into concave cylindrical surfaces, and a soft iron cylinder is placed inside the coil. This creates a radial magnetic field: the field lines always point radially outward (or inward), so the plane of the coil is always parallel to the field as it rotates.

That is what makes the deflection directly proportional to current — a linear scale.

The Physics in Equations

Let the coil have $N$ turns, each of area $A$. A current $I$ flows through it. The magnetic field strength is $B$ (radial). The torque due to the magnetic field on a single turn is:

This is because the force on each vertical side of the coil is $I L B$ (where $L$ is the length of the side), and the lever arm is the width of the coil, so the product gives $I \times (\text{area}) \times B$ per turn.

The spring provides a restoring torque proportional to the twist angle $\theta$:

where $k$ is the torsion constant of the spring (unit: N·m/rad).

At equilibrium, the two torques balance:

So the deflection is:

The quantity $\frac{N A B}{k}$ is called the current sensitivity of the galvanometer. It tells you how many radians of deflection you get per ampere of current.

What This Means for a Student

• Larger $N$, $A$, or $B$ makes the galvanometer more sensitive — more deflection for the same current. …