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A separate law of nature, the Lorentz force law, describes how the electric and magnetic fields act on charged particles and currents. By convention, a version of this law in the original equations by Maxwell is no longer included. The vector calculus formalism below, the work of Oliver Heaviside, [6] [7] has become standard.
In physics (specifically electromagnetism), Gauss's law, also known as Gauss's flux theorem (or sometimes Gauss's theorem), is one of Maxwell's equations. It is an application of the divergence theorem , and it relates the distribution of electric charge to the resulting electric field .
If electromagnetic energy is not gained from or lost to other forms of energy within some region (e.g., mechanical energy, or heat), then electromagnetic energy is locally conserved within that region, yielding a continuity equation as a special case of Poynting's theorem: = where is the energy density of the electromagnetic field. This ...
where: is the rate of change of the energy density in the volume. ∇•S is the energy flow out of the volume, given by the divergence of the Poynting vector S. J•E is the rate at which the fields do work on charges in the volume (J is the current density corresponding to the motion of charge, E is the electric field, and • is the dot product).
Continuous charge distribution. The volume charge density ρ is the amount of charge per unit volume (cube), surface charge density σ is amount per unit surface area (circle) with outward unit normal nĚ‚, d is the dipole moment between two point charges, the volume density of these is the polarization density P.
If magnetic monopoles were to be discovered, then Gauss's law for magnetism would state the divergence of B would be proportional to the magnetic charge density ρ m, analogous to Gauss's law for electric field. For zero net magnetic charge density (ρ m = 0), the original form of Gauss's magnetism law is the result.
In three dimensions, the derivative has a special structure allowing the introduction of a cross product: = + = + from which it is easily seen that Gauss's law is the scalar part, the Ampère–Maxwell law is the vector part, Faraday's law is the pseudovector part, and Gauss's law for magnetism is the pseudoscalar part of the equation.
In vector calculus, divergence is a vector operator that operates on a vector field, producing a scalar field giving the quantity of the vector field's source at each point. More technically, the divergence represents the volume density of the outward flux of a vector field from an infinitesimal volume around a given point.