Wednesday, 27 December 2017

electromagnetism - Showing that Coulomb and Lorenz Gauges are indeed valid Gauge Transformations?


I'm working my way through Griffith's Introduction to Electrodynamics. In Ch. 10, gauge transformations are introduced. The author shows that, given any magnetic potential $\textbf{A}_0$ and electric potentials $V_0$, we can create a new set of equivalent magnetic and electric potentials given by:


$$ \textbf{A} = \textbf{A}_0 + \nabla\lambda \\ V = V_0 - \frac{\partial \lambda}{\partial t}. $$


These transformations are defined as a "gauge transformation". The author then introduces two of these transformations, the Coulomb and Lorenz gauge, defined respectively as:


$$ \nabla \cdot \textbf{A} = 0 \\ \nabla \cdot \textbf{A}= -\mu_0\epsilon_0\frac{\partial V}{\partial t}. $$



This is where I am confused. I do not understand how picking the divergence of $\textbf{A}$ to be either of these two values actually constitutes a gauge transformation, as in it meets the conditions of the top two equations. How do we know that such a $\lambda$ even exists for setting the divergence of $\textbf{A}$ to either of these values. Can someone convince me that such a function exists for either transformation, or somehow show me that these transformations are indeed "gauge transformations" as they are defined above.



Answer



Comment to the question (v1): It seems OP is conflating, on one hand, a gauge transformation


$$ \tilde{A}_{\mu} ~=~ A_{\mu} +d_{\mu}\Lambda $$


with, on the other hand, a gauge-fixing condition, i.e. choosing a gauge, such e.g., Lorenz gauge, Coulomb gauge, axial gauge, temporal gauge, etc.


A gauge transformation can e.g. go between two gauge-fixing conditions. More generally, gauge transformations run along gauge orbits. Ideally a gauge-fixing condition intersects all gauge orbits exactly once.


Mathematically, depending on the topology of spacetime, it is often a non-trivial issue whether such a gauge-fixing condition is globally well-defined and uniquely specifies the gauge-field, cf. e.g. the Gribov problem. Existence and uniqueness of solutions to gauge-fixing conditions is the topic of several Phys.SE posts, see e.g. this and this Phys.SE posts.


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