We discuss duality invariant interactions between electromagnetic fields and matter. The case of scalar fields is treated in some detail. ∗Contribution to the memorial volume for D.V. Volkov. †This work was supported in part by the Director, Office of Energy Research, Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics, Division of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC...

In the context of the fact that the existence of dark energy causing the accelerated expansion of the universe has been confirmed by the WMAP and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we reexamine gravitation itself, starting with the formulation of Sakharov and show that it is possible to obtain gravitation in terms of the electromagnetic charge of elementary particles, once the ZPF and its effects at...

A tensor description of perturbative Einsteinian gravity about an arbitrary background spacetime is developed. By analogy with the covariant laws of electromagnetism in spacetime, gravito-electromagnetic potentials are defined to emulate the gauge transformations of electromagnetic potentials under substitutions belonging to the gauge symmetry group of perturbative gravitation. These definition...

This article discusses finite element Galerkin schemes for a number of linear model problems in electromagnetism. The finite element schemes are introduced as discrete differential forms, matching the coordinate-independent statement of Maxwell’s equations in the calculus of differential forms. The asymptotic convergence of discrete solutions is investigated theoretically. As discrete different...

Understanding the connections between magnetism and electricity and exploiting that understanding for technological innovation dominated science in the nineteenth century, and yet no one saw it coming. In the index to Butterfield’s classic history of the scientific revolution [3], which he locates roughly from 1300 to 1800, the word “electricity” does not appear. Nobody in 1800 could have imagi...

Classical electromagnetism and quantum mechanics are both central to the modern understanding of the physical world and its ongoing technological development. Quantum simulations of electromagnetic forces have the potential to provide information about materials and systems that do not have conveniently solvable theoretical descriptions, such as those related to quantum Hall physics, or that ha...

The dual symmetry between electric and magnetic fields is an important intrinsic property of Maxwell equations in free space. This symmetry underlies the conservation of optical helicity and, as we show here, is closely related to the separation of spin and orbital degrees of freedom of light (the helicity flux coincides with the spin angular momentum). However, in the standard field-theory for...

If gravitation and electromagnetism are both described in terms of a symmetric metric tensor, then the deflection of an electron beam by a charged sphere should be different from its deflection according to the Reissner-Nordstrøm solution of General Relativity. If such a unified description is true, the equivalence principle for the electric field implies that the photon has a nonzero effective...