Do electric fields have their own separate inherent charge?

[Herbascious J]

I am assuming the answer is NO. I realize that the electric field of any charged object has an energy density, but I was curious to know it that same field has it's own 'charge density' so to speak, and that it would have a small secondary electric field of it's own. This would imply that there would be a cascading series of fields that diminished to zero fairly rapidly, so I don't believe it, but I just wanted to verify that this was in fact, NOT true.

 

[phinds]

I think you have answered your own question.

 

[vanhees71]

The electromagnetic field is uncharged. The deeper reason for this is that it is described by an Abelian gauge theory. In Non-abelian gauge theories the gauge bosons carry the corresponding charge themselves. An example is Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory that describes the strong interaction.

This kind of theories has quite surprising consequences. One is that QCD describes confinement, i.e., the fact that no free particles carrying a non-zero color charge have been ever observed. The fundamental building blocks of matter, carrying color charge are the quarks (spin-1/2 particles) and gluons, which are the analoga of photons for the electromagnetic field. Due to the fact that the gluons carry charge, all color charged-particles are "confined" into color-charge neutral bound states, the hadrons. The usual ones consist of a (valence) quark-anti-quark bound state, the socalled mesons, or three (valence) quarks, the baryons (among them protons and neutrons building up all the atomic nuclei making the matter around us).

 

[Vanadium 50]

B-level!