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Lecture

Electromagnetic Potentials

In course

PHYS-114: General physics : electromagnetism

Le cours traite des concepts de l'électromagnétisme, avec le support d'expériences. Les sujets traités inclus l'électrostatique, le courant électrique et circuits, la magnétostatique, l'induction électromagnétique, les équations de Maxwell, et les ondes él ...

Description

This lecture covers Maxwell's equations, focusing on the electromagnetic potentials. It explains how these equations allow finding electric and magnetic forces given a distribution of charges and currents. The lecture also discusses the local nature of Maxwell's equations, the concept of displacement current, and the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. Furthermore, it explores the constraints in electromagnetism and the introduction of scalar and vector potentials to simplify the equations. The presentation concludes by highlighting the gauge transformation and the reduction of independent functions in the context of electromagnetic potentials.

Instructors (3)

Jan Hugo Dil

Lesya Shchutska

Fabio Avino

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Physics

Electromagnetism: Electrodynamics

Related concepts (32)

Electromagnetic field

An electromagnetic field (also EM field or EMF) is a classical (i.e. non-quantum) field produced by moving electric charges. It is the field described by classical electrodynamics (a classical field theory) and is the classical counterpart to the quantized electromagnetic field tensor in quantum electrodynamics (a quantum field theory). The electromagnetic field propagates at the speed of light (in fact, this field can be identified as light) and interacts with charges and currents.

Electromagnetic four-potential

An electromagnetic four-potential is a relativistic vector function from which the electromagnetic field can be derived. It combines both an electric scalar potential and a magnetic vector potential into a single four-vector. As measured in a given frame of reference, and for a given gauge, the first component of the electromagnetic four-potential is conventionally taken to be the electric scalar potential, and the other three components make up the magnetic vector potential.

Electromagnetic tensor

In electromagnetism, the electromagnetic tensor or electromagnetic field tensor (sometimes called the field strength tensor, Faraday tensor or Maxwell bivector) is a mathematical object that describes the electromagnetic field in spacetime. The field tensor was first used after the four-dimensional tensor formulation of special relativity was introduced by Hermann Minkowski. The tensor allows related physical laws to be written very concisely, and allows for the quantization of the electromagnetic field by Lagrangian formulation described below.

Magnetic field

A magnetic field is a vector field that describes the magnetic influence on moving electric charges, electric currents, and magnetic materials. A moving charge in a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to its own velocity and to the magnetic field. A permanent magnet's magnetic field pulls on ferromagnetic materials such as iron, and attracts or repels other magnets.

Electric potential

The electric potential (also called the electric field potential, potential drop, the electrostatic potential) is defined as the amount of work energy needed per unit of electric charge to move this charge from a reference point to the specific point in an electric field. More precisely, it is the energy per unit charge for a test charge that is so small that the disturbance of the field under consideration is negligible.

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