Tuesday, October 3, 2017

electromagnetism - Is the electromagnetic mass real?


In his Lectures on Physics vol II Ch.28-2 Feynman calculates the field momentum of a moving charged sphere with charge $q$, radius $a$ and velocity $\mathbf{v}$. He finds that the total momentum in the electromagnetic field around the charged sphere is given by:


$$\mathbf{p} = \frac{2}{3} \frac{q^2}{4\pi \epsilon_0} \frac{\mathbf{v}}{ac^2}.$$


He calls the coefficient between the field momentum, $\mathbf{p}$, and the velocity, $\mathbf{v}$, the electromagnetic mass:


$$m_\textrm{elec}=\frac{2}{3} \frac{q^2}{4\pi \epsilon_0 a c^2}.$$


He claims that this electromagnetic mass $m_\textrm{elec}$ has to be added to the standard "mechanical mass" of the sphere to give the total observed mass of the object.



Would this view be accepted by most physicists today?


Have any experiments been performed that show the effect of the additional electromagnetic mass on the dynamics of a macroscopic charged object?


I guess the problem is that such an effect would only be large enough to be observable for charged particles like electrons. In that case it would be difficult to distinguish mechanical mass, presumably due to the Higgs field, from electromagnetic mass. Maybe one could perform a high energy/short length scale experiment on an electron that excluded the effect of the electromagnetic mass?




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