Saturday, 19 May 2018

electromagnetism - Derivation of Maxwell stress tensor from EM Lagrangian


From Noether's theorem applied to fields we can get the general expression for the stress-energy-momentum tensor for some fields:


$$T^{\mu}_{\;\nu} = \sum_{i} \left(\frac{\partial \mathcal{L}}{\partial \partial_{\mu}\phi_{i}}\partial_{\nu}\phi_{i}\right)-\delta^{\mu}_{\;\nu}\mathcal{L}$$


The EM Lagrangian, in the Weyl gauge, is:


$$\mathcal{L} = \frac{1}{2}\epsilon_{0}\left(\frac{\partial \vec{A}}{\partial t}\right)^{2}-\frac{1}{2\mu_{0}}\left(\vec{\nabla}\times \vec{A}\right)^{2}$$


Applying the above, all I manage to get for the pressure along x, which I believe corresponds to the first diagonal element of the Maxwell stress tensor, is:


$$p_{x} = \sigma_{xx} = -T^{xx} = \frac{-1}{\mu_{0}}\left(\left(\partial_{x}A_{z}\right)^{2}-\partial_{x}A_{z}\partial_{z}A_{x}-\left(\partial_{x}A_{y}\right)^{2}+\partial_{x}A_{y}\partial_{y}A_{x}\right)+\mathcal{L}$$


But I can't see how this can be equal to what is given in Wikipedia.Why is this?




Answer



Hint: The canonical stress-energy tensor from Noether's theorem is not necessarily symmetric, and often needs to be improved with appropriate improvements terms. This is e.g. the case for EM. See also e.g. this Phys.SE post and links therein.


References:



  1. Landau and Lifshitz, Vol.2, The Classical Theory of Fields, $\S$33.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Understanding Stagnation point in pitot fluid

What is stagnation point in fluid mechanics. At the open end of the pitot tube the velocity of the fluid becomes zero.But that should result...