Do Charged Particles Exhibit Stronger Gravitational Fields?

Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
36 replies · 5K views
TurtleMeister said:
Are you saying that the uncharged particle is not a source of a gravitational field?

I figured that he meant that the field for the charged object is also a source of curvature. But I think he also meant the same for it's mass.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
When you are computing the energy density of an uncharged object in the stress energy tensor, do you include it's "rest-mass" energy density too?
 
Just to be clear, I can't add the stress-energy tensor of a charged subatomic particle in terms of its mass and the stress-energy tensor of the same subatomic particle in terms of its charge?
 
quantumfoam said:
Just to be clear, I can't add the stress-energy tensor of a charged subatomic particle in terms of its mass and the stress-energy tensor of the same subatomic particle in terms of its charge?
You can add the stress energy tensors, but the resulting curvature tensors don't add.
 
quantumfoam said:
Just to be clear, I can't add the stress-energy tensor of a charged subatomic particle in terms of its mass and the stress-energy tensor of the same subatomic particle in terms of its charge?

Hello

Including charge in the equations of motion opens the door to Lorentz force to be applied on the test particles. This happens to be the case if an electromagnetic stress tensor is added to the gravitational one since the Lorentz force is related with electromagnetic strength tensor [itex]F_{{\mu}{\nu}}[/itex] in GR, as many others may have informed you of. Since it is an additive effect, then of course the field would be slightly stronger though for a subatomic particle like electron, gravity loses to Coulomb strength by [itex]10^{-42}[/itex] which is quite decent for it to be neglected in any physical scale.

P