Does a capacitor have an infinite resistance?

A capacitor has an infinite resistance (well, unless the voltage gets so high it breaks down). The simplest capacitor is made from two parallel plates with nothing but space in between - as you can guess from its electronic symbol. In a DC circuit, a capacitor acts as an open circuit and does not permit current to pass.

What is the resistance of an ideal capacitor?

The resistance of an ideal capacitor is infinite. The reactance of an ideal capacitor, and therefore its impedance, is negative for all frequency and capacitance values. The effective impedance (absolute value) of a capacitor is dependent on the frequency, and for ideal capacitors always decreases with frequency.

Do capacitors resist current?

Capacitors do not so much resist current; it is more productive to think in terms of them reacting to it. The current through a capacitor is equal to the capacitance times the rate of change of the capacitor voltage with respect to time (i.e., its slope).

What makes a good capacitor?

There are several other factors that go into this decision including temperature stability, leakage resistance (effective parallel resistance), ESR (equivalent series resistance) and breakdown strength. For an ideal capacitor, leakage resistance would be infinite and ESR would be zero.

What is the impedance of a capacitor?

The impedance (or equivalent resistance) for a capacitor is 1/ωC 1 / ω C where ω ω is the current frequency and C C the capacitance. For DC, ω = 0 ω = 0 and hence the impedance is infinite. But for non-zero frequencies, it is finite and hence high frequency currents can pass through.

What does a high resistance capacitor mean?

This is the resistance due to the leakage current that flows through the dielectric material of the capacitor when a voltage is applied across it. Ideally, this should be very high, indicating very low leakage current, but in real capacitors, it is finite.