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

W have seen that the garden 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]

Forest_UCM_Energy#Second_requirement_for_Conservative_Force