Magnetism and Magnetic Force Studies

kheorman

Magnetism and magnetic force are typically explained by the resultant effect on moving charges. Is anyone aware of any reseach, studies or literature that quantifies the interactive forces between two or more magnetic objects without utilizing the effect on moving charges to explain interactive relationships?

turin

I know that in classically electrodynamics there is a law (one of the four Maxwell's equations) that strictly forbids the existence of magnetic monopoles. Many people interpret this as the non-existence of strictly magnetic sources. This may or may not be true. It seems reasonable

However, the Faraday tensor and its dual provide one with Maxwell's equations, and there is an inconsistency in the divergence of these two related objects, which some think suggests the existence of magnetic monopoles.

What I would do, if I were so inclined, is to search for papers using keywords "magnetic monopole."

kheorman

I'll try the search. While I am not pursuing magnetic monopoles in my research, I due believe in the existance of strictly magnetic sources. I would like to work like to be able to work without having to deal with electrical parameters and units. My original posting was an effort not to recreate a wheel that may already exist.

Janitor

In accordance with what Turin posted, do some research on some ideas that Paul Dirac had on what magnetic monopoles would be like if in fact they exist in nature. I think John Wheeler even tried to tie the (also very hypothetical) idea of wormholes in with Dirac's hypothetical monopole.

turin

If your goal is to be able to use a magnetic source instead of electric currents and such, then I am 99.9% convinced that you are out of luck. The Faraday tensor is intimately driven by the ELECTRIC charge current density 4-vector in the well established/experimentally demonstrated E&M theory. There would be special cases (some magnetostatics) in which you could probably get away with this, but not generally.

Of course, you could "conveniently define" a system of units so that all the parameters are unity, if that's all you're after.

Janitor

I believe it is the case that even if you have a pure magnetic field in some region, as seen by some certain observer, another observer moving relative to that one will see a mixture of magnetic and electric fields.

turin

Yes, but (fortunately for kheorman) this does not require a source. This is just a consequence of a coordinate transformation that results in the appearance of nontrivial oblique components in the dual of the Faraday tensor.