Comments on ’’What the electromagnetic vector potential describes’’

Yves Gingras

Yves Gingras

Paul J. Côté, Mark A. Johnson

The seminal paper on the meaning of the vector potential by E. J. Konopinski is revisited. The full significance of this work has not been generally recognized to date. We first briefly review Konopinski's findings and show that many of his key results can be obtained from a simpler and more familiar approach. We then discuss the additional implications of his analyses, which were overlooked by Konopinski himself.

Robert Golub, J. P. Carrico, T. S. Stein +1 more

Edwin Albert Power, T. Thirunamachandran

It is shown that both Hamiltonians, one with $\ensuremath{-}\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\ensuremath{\mu}}\ifmmode\cdot\else\textperiodcentered\fi{}\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\mathrm{E}}$ and the other with $\ensuremath{-}\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\ensuremath{\mu}}\ifmmode\cdot\else\textperiodcentered\fi{}\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\mathrm{A}}$ as interaction energy between an atom and the electromagnetic field, lead to Maxwell's equations. In contrast to the viewpoint in Mandel's paper, $\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\mathrm{E}}$ is considered to be proportional to the canonically conjugate field of the vector potential.

Lajos Jánossy