Forest UCM Energy CurlFcons

A force with a curl of zero is a conservative force.

Thus taking the curl of the force is an easier way to test for conservative forces rather than calculating the work and inspecting to see if it only depends on the endpoints of the motion.

Definition of curl

We have seen that the gradient operator is defined in cartesian coordinates as

[math]\vec \nabla = \frac{\partial}{\partial x} \hat i +\frac{\partial}{\partial y} \hat j +\frac{\partial}{\partial z} \hat k[/math]

can be used to find the function form of a conservative force given its potential energy

Forest_UCM_Energy#Second_requirement_for_Conservative_Force