Energy, Momentum, and Angular Momentum in Classical Electrodynamics

Article 98002 introduced the stress-energy tensor for the electromagnetic field interacting with a charged particle in flat spacetime. This article highlights the associated conservation laws, shows how the conservation of momentum can be used to infer the Lorentz force equation that governs the particle's behavior, and clarifies the relationship of the stress-energy tensor to the "spin" of the electromagnetic field.

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Revision history

2024-06-23 (clarified a footnote about gauge invariance and observables)
2024-03-03 (added an equation to make the convention for the spacetime metric more prominent)
2023-10-26 (added a footnote about units)
2022-10-23 (updated bibliography to include publication data instead of only arxiv link)
2022-06-11 (updated references to other articles in this series to link to html abstract pages instead of to pdfs. Didn't change the version number/date)
2022-02-20 (added a paragraph about the importance of relative signs, added a footnote about notation, and added boxes around some equations)
2022-02-18 (first version)

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updated 2024-12-14

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Energy, Momentum, and Angular Momentum in Classical Electrodynamics

Revision history