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Friday, January 22, 2016

Charged rotating sphere in five dimensions

I calculate the electromagnetic field of a charged rotating sphere in 4 + 1 dimensions. Griffiths calculates the magnetic field of a charged rotating sphere in 3 + 1 dimensions in example 5.11 in his book. In this post, I perform a similar calculation but in 4+1 dimensions.
The sphere in this post is the set of points x21+x22+x23+x24=R2. It is called a 3-sphere, the radius is R. I use the following normalization for the Maxwell action S=14d5x|g|FμνFμν+d5x|g|jμAμ
with g the determinant of the metric, jμ the source and F the electromagnetic field F=12Fμνdxμdxν=dA
Digression about electromagnetic fields in higher dimensions. In 3+1 dimensions, electromagnetic theory is usually described with an electric field E and a magnetic field B. When one does relativistic calculations, one combines E and B in an anti-symmetric 4×4 matrix Fμν, called the electromagnetic field tensor. This sounds more difficult than it is: just put the field E in the first column of Fμν, and sprinkle the components of B in the 3×3 block in the bottom right of Fμν
In 4 + 1 dimensions, the natural place to start building an electromagnetic theory is a 5×5 matrix Fμν; if one decomposes this in electric and magnetic components, the electric field is still a vector Ei (with four components now), but the magnetic field is not a vector anymore, but a 4×4 anti-symmetric matrix Bij. This is again easy to see: the electric field can be found in the first column of Fμν, the magnetic field Bij is the 4×4 matrix in the lower bottom right corner of Fμν.

I parametrize the space R4 as x1=rsinθ cosϕx2=rsinθ sinϕx3=rcosθ cosψx4=rcosθ sinψ
In these coordinates (they are known as Hopf coordinates), the metric in 4+1 dimensions is ds2=dt2+dr2+r2dθ2+r2sin2θdϕ2+r2cos2θdψ2

Digression about rotation in higher dimensions. In three (space) dimensions, a rotation is specified by an angular velocity vector; this is a (pseudo) vector which points along the axis of rotation and has length equal to the angular frequency. This does not work in four dimensions: after one fixes an axis, there would still be three dimensions left over for the body to move in; leaving too much freedom to define the rotation. Therefore, in four (and higher) dimensions, rotation is specified by an anti-symmetric matrix, or, equivalently, by specifying planes and angular frequencies in those planes. Notice that one could have chosen to specify rotations in three dimensions with an anti-symmetric 3×3 matrix as well; this is usually not done.

I let the sphere rotate in the x1,x2 plane with angular frequency ω1 and in the x3,x4 plane with angular frequency ω2. The current j is thus j=σδ(rR)(t+ω1ϕ+ω2ψ)
with σ the charge density on the sphere. Maxwell's equations are 1|g|ν(|g|Fμν)=jμ
I use as ansatz for the electromagnetic potential A=V(r)dt+h(r)(ω1sin2θdϕ+ω2cos2θdψ)
The equations (2) are then easily solved and give for rR V(r)=σR2andh(r)=σR4r2
and for rR V(r)=σR32r2andh(r)=σR54r2


Observations

  1. For r<R A=σR2dt+σR4r2(ω1sin2θdϕ+ω2cos2θdψ)
    and thus F=dA=σR4(ω1d(r2sin2θ)dϕ+ω2d(r2cos2θ)dψ)
    With a bit of calculation, one sees that this is equal to F=σR2(ω1dx1dx2+ω2dx3dx4)
    Hence, inside the sphere the electric field is zero, and the magnetic field is homogeneous and proportional to the rotation matrix ω1dx1dx2+ω2dx3dx4. Both of these properties are exactly as in 3+1 dimensions, see Griffiths, example 5.11
  2. For r>R the electric potential V is proportional to 1/r2. This is as expected: in D space dimensions, the electric potential V is proportional to 1/rD2
In the next post, I will try to calculate again the electromagnetic field of a rotating sphere in five dimensions, not in Maxwell's theory, but in Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory.

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