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Lorentz force acting on fast-moving charged particles in a bubble chamber.Positive and negative charge trajectories curve in opposite directions. In physics, specifically in electromagnetism, the Lorentz force law is the combination of electric and magnetic force on a point charge due to electromagnetic fields.
The formula provides a natural generalization of the Coulomb's law for cases where the source charge is moving: = [′ ′ + ′ (′ ′) + ′] = ′ Here, and are the electric and magnetic fields respectively, is the electric charge, is the vacuum permittivity (electric field constant) and is the speed of light.
The same situations that create magnetic fields—charge moving in a current or in an atom, and intrinsic magnetic dipoles—are also the situations in which a magnetic field has an effect, creating a force. Following is the formula for moving charge; for the forces on an intrinsic dipole, see magnetic dipole.
However, if the test charge is in motion parallel to the current, the situation changes. In the rest frame of the test charge, the positive and negative charges in the wire are moving at different speeds, and so the positive and negative charge distributions are Lorentz-contracted by different amounts. Consequently, the wire has a nonzero net ...
Considering the charge to be invariant of observer, the electric and magnetic fields of a uniformly moving point charge can hence be derived by the Lorentz transformation of the four force on the test charge in the charge's frame of reference given by Coulomb's law and attributing magnetic and electric fields by their definitions given by the ...
Maxwell's equations posit that there is electric charge, but no magnetic charge (also called magnetic monopoles), in the universe. Indeed, magnetic charge has never been observed, despite extensive searches, [note 7] and may not exist. If they did exist, both Gauss's law for magnetism and Faraday's law would need to be modified, and the ...
An observer at rest with respect to a system of static, free charges will see no magnetic field. However, a moving observer looking at the same set of charges does perceive a current, and thus a magnetic field. That is, the magnetic field is simply the electric field, as seen in a moving coordinate system.
An overriding requirement on the descriptions in different frameworks is that they be consistent.Consistency is an issue because Newtonian mechanics predicts one transformation (so-called Galilean invariance) for the forces that drive the charges and cause the current, while electrodynamics as expressed by Maxwell's equations predicts that the fields that give rise to these forces transform ...