meanfreepath (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
meanfreepath) wrote2006-01-25 01:13 am
meanfreepath) wrote2006-01-25 01:13 am
Interesting fact about electromagnetism
So I've been reading a number of papers by a group at UCLA that did the first laboratory experiments on magnetic reconnection (Yes, I should have finished reading and writing about the UCLA experiment by now, but I have been angsty/indecisive/lazy). A bunch of their figures were plots of contours of constant vector potential, which they claimed were magnetic field lines.
This seemed weird at first; I had never heard of it. It wasn't mentioned anywhere in Griffiths, either. A Google search turned up this, though.
There the claim is made that for a 2D planar system, you can define a flux function that turns out to be the component of magnetic vector potential A perpendicular to the plane, and that the flux function is constant along magnetic field lines. That's indeed what they've plotted. However, I would like to see a proof of this. Cornell Library is closed -- has anyone who has had graduate E/M or has a copy of Jackson available ever seen anything like this?
This seemed weird at first; I had never heard of it. It wasn't mentioned anywhere in Griffiths, either. A Google search turned up this, though.
There the claim is made that for a 2D planar system, you can define a flux function that turns out to be the component of magnetic vector potential A perpendicular to the plane, and that the flux function is constant along magnetic field lines. That's indeed what they've plotted. However, I would like to see a proof of this. Cornell Library is closed -- has anyone who has had graduate E/M or has a copy of Jackson available ever seen anything like this?