Related papers: A general realistic treatment of the disk paradox
A charged particle initially at rest in an external magnetic field starts to rotate when the magnetic field is switched off. This is a variant of the Feynman disc paradox, where the conservation of angular momentum is seemingly violated.…
That static electric and magnetic fields can store momentum may be perplexing, but is necessary to ensure total conservation of momentum. Simple situations in which such field momentum is transferred to nearby bodies and point charges have…
The total angular momentum of a close system is a conserved quantity, which should remain constant in time for any excitation experiment once the pumping signal has extinguished. Such conservation, however, is never satisfied in practice in…
The inversion of cause and effect in the classic description of electromagnetism, gives rise to a conceptual error which is at the bottom of many paradoxes and exceptions. At present, the curious fact that unipolar induction or the Faraday…
We analyze the laws of conservation of momentum and angular momentum in classical electrodynamics of material media with bound charges, and explore the possibility to describe the properties of such media via a discrete set of point-like…
We prove both analytically and numerically that the total angular momentum of a molecular system undergoing adiabatic Born-Oppenheimer dynamics is conserved only when pseudo-magnetic Berry forces are taken into account. This finding sheds…
We develop a complete relativistic theory to describe the dynamics of electronic angular momentum including both spin (S) and orbital (L) contributions in magnetic systems. We start with the relativistic Dirac-Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian under…
This scientific essay proposes to discuss the physical aspects of a system consisting of some non-relativistic massive charged particles, that are the sources in motion of an electromagnetic field (e.m.) propagating through the space,…
The Feynman demonstration that electromagnetic field momentum is real-even for static fields-can be made more pedagogically useful by simplifying its geometry. Instead of Feynman's disk with charged balls on its surface, this article uses…
L. H. Thomas, in his 1927 paper, "The Kinematics of an Electron with an Axis", explained the then-anomalous factor of one-half in atomic spin-orbit coupling as due to a relativistic precession of the electron spin axis. Thomas's explanation…
Exact conservation of the angular momentum is worked out for an elastic medium with spins. The intrinsic anharmonicity of the elastic theory is shown to be crucial for conserving the total momentum. As a result, any spin-lattice dynamics…
The effect of angular momentum conservation in microcanonical thermodynamics is considered. This is relevant in gravitating systems, where angular momentum is conserved and the collapsing nature of the forces makes the microcanonical…
The total momentum of a thermodynamically closed system is unique, as is the total energy. Nevertheless, there is continuing confusion concerning the correct form of the momentum and the energy-momentum tensor for an electromagnetic field…
In 1967 Shockley and James addressed the situation of a magnet in an electric field. The magnet is at rest and contains electromagnetic momentum, but there was no obvious mechanical momentum to balance this for momentum conservation. They…
The resolution of Mansuripur's paradox appears in numerous papers in the physics literature, preserves the Lorentz force but depends on the concept of hidden momentum. Here I propose a different resolution based on the overlooked fact that…
When waves damp or amplify on resonant particles in a plasma, the nonresonant particles experience a recoil force that conserves the total momentum between the particles and electromagnetic fields. This force is important to understand, as…
We establish global existence and uniqueness of the dynamics of classical electromagnetism with extended, rigid charges and fields which need not to be square integrable. We consider also a modified theory of electromagnetism where no…
We consider a cylindrical metallic magnet that is set into rotation about a horizontal axis by a falling mass. In such a system the magnetic field will cause a radial current which is non-solenoidal. This leads to charge accumulation and a…
The angular momentum of a classical electromagnetic plane wave of arbitrary extent is predicted to be, on theoretical grounds, exactly zero. However, finite sections of circularly polarized plane waves are found experimentally to carry…
We ask the question of how angular momentum is conserved in electroweak interaction processes. To introduce the problem with a minimum of mathematics, we first raise the same issue in elastic scattering of a circularly polarized photon by…