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Electromagnetic radiation was first quantized in this gauge. The Coulomb gauge admits a natural Hamiltonian formulation of the evolution equations of the electromagnetic field interacting with a conserved current, [citation needed] which is an advantage for the quantization of the theory. The Coulomb gauge is, however, not Lorentz covariant.
The Lorenz gauge hence contradicted Maxwell's original derivation of the EM wave equation by introducing a retardation effect to the Coulomb force and bringing it inside the EM wave equation alongside the time varying electric field, which was introduced in Lorenz's paper "On the identity of the vibrations of light with electrical currents".
The gauge-fixed potentials still have a gauge freedom under all gauge transformations that leave the gauge fixing equations invariant. Inspection of the potential equations suggests two natural choices. In the Coulomb gauge, we impose ∇ ⋅ A = 0, which is mostly used in the case of magneto statics when we can neglect the c −2 ∂ 2 A/∂t ...
Position vectors r and r′ used in the calculation. The starting point is Maxwell's equations in the potential formulation using the Lorenz gauge: =, = where φ(r, t) is the electric potential and A(r, t) is the magnetic vector potential, for an arbitrary source of charge density ρ(r, t) and current density J(r, t), and is the D'Alembert operator. [2]
While both the scalar and vector potential depend upon the frame, the electromagnetic four-potential is Lorentz covariant. Like other potentials, many different electromagnetic four-potentials correspond to the same electromagnetic field, depending upon the choice of gauge.
The Lorenz gauge condition is a Lorentz-invariant gauge condition. (This can be contrasted with other gauge conditions such as the Coulomb gauge, which if it holds in one inertial frame will generally not hold in any other.)
Using the 4-potential in the Lorenz gauge, an alternative manifestly-covariant formulation can be found in a single equation (a generalization of an equation due to Bernhard Riemann by Arnold Sommerfeld, known as the Riemann–Sommerfeld equation, [15] or the covariant form of the Maxwell equations [16]):
The Liénard–Wiechert potentials describe the classical electromagnetic effect of a moving electric point charge in terms of a vector potential and a scalar potential in the Lorenz gauge. Stemming directly from Maxwell's equations , these describe the complete, relativistically correct, time-varying electromagnetic field for a point charge in ...