Charge

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Charge
Lewis Ryder
School of Physical Sciences, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Abstract
This article surveys our understanding of electric charge from Coulombs day
to the present.
From Coulomb to QED
Probably the most well-known fact about electric
charge is that like charges repel, unlike charges
attract; and the force of attraction or repulsion is
given by Coulombs law
F =
q
1
q
2
4
0
r
2
r. (1)
Here r is a unit vector pointing from q
1
to q
2
and
F is the force felt by q
2
, so if both charges are
positive (or both negative) the force is directed
along r and is repulsive. In passing, it is worth
remarking on the similarity between this inverse
square law and Newtons law for the gravitational
force
F =
m
1
m
2
G
r
2
r. (2)
The similarity is that both laws are inverse
square laws. The rst obvious differences
between gravitation and electricity, however, are
that charges come with both signspositive or
negativebut all masses are positive; and that
the gravitational force between two (positive)
masses is attractive, not repulsive. It turns out
that the similarity in form between (1) and (2)
is something of a coincidence. They are both
approximationsthough extremely good ones
to other expressions, which are totally different in
form for electricity and gravity.
Although Coulombs law was found to
work well, some unease was expressed with it,
particularly by French mathematicians in the 18th
century. Taken at face value, it would appear
that the charge q
2
(say), a nite distance from q
1
,
experiences a force due to q
1
without anything
happening in between. This is, in fact, action
at a distance, and such a notion was felt to be,
philosophically at least, dubious. How can there
be an effect at one point, of a cause at another
point, without anything happening between them?
The solution to this problem was to introduce the
notion of an electric eld. The charge q
1
creates
about itself an electric eld
E =
q
1
4
0
r
2
r. (3)
This eld permeates all space, and a charge q
2
,
when placed in the eld a distance r away from
q
1
, will experience a force F = q
2
E, with E
the value of the electric eld where q
2
is. This
clearly reproduces Coulombs law above, but the
important difference is that now we have a picture
of a charge responding to a eld at the point where
the charge is sitting, and so have abolished the idea
of action at a distance. But then the important
questionsince we are hard-headed scientists
is, is this electric eld real, or are we simply
inventing a verbal formula to get us out of a
philosophical difculty? Before answering this,
let me remark here, for later reference, that the
expression for the eld E (which has only a radial
component) above can be written as
E
r
=
V
r
, V =
q
1
4
0
r
; (4)
the electric eld is (minus) the gradient of the
Coulomb potential V.
The next chapter in the development of
this subject is Maxwells theory. As well as
electrical there are also magnetic phenomena,
0031-9120/07/020141+05$30.00 2007 IOP Publishing Ltd PHYS I CS EDUCAT I ON 42 (2) 141
L Ryder
Table 1. The eld quanta and Z are actually mixtures of W
0
and Xsee the text.
Source Field Quantum Mass of quantum
Charge Electromagnetic Photon 0
Weak isospin W eld W
+
, W

81 GeV/c
2
Weak hypercharge X eld Z 91 GeV/c
2
and Maxwells great contribution was to show
precisely how these were related to each other.
Maxwells equations are cast in the language
of elds and one of their consequences is that,
if a charge oscillates about a mean position,
the electromagnetic eld carries energy away (a
radiative solution to the equations). The eld
must therefore be a real entity. This radiative
eld was rst found experimentally by Hertz in
Karlsruhe, and is of course the eld involved in
radio transmission. The electric eld therefore
is indeed real; it is not simply a form of words
to cover our embarrassment about action at a
distance. The result of all this is that, as well as
electric charges (more precisely, particles carrying
electric charge) existing in Nature, there also exists
an electromagnetic eld. And the way in which
charges interact with each other is through the
electric (electromagnetic, in general) eld.
And so to Planck and the quantum theory.
Planck realized that in order to account for the
measured intensity versus frequency variation of
black body radiation it was necessary to introduce
the notion of (electromagnetic) eld quanta, and
this hypothesis was used by Einstein to explain
the photoelectric effect. The electromagnetic eld
was not an innitely divisible substance, but
consisted of very large numbers of quanta, or
photons (gamma rays, ). So when we combine
Maxwells electrodynamics with quantum theory,
the simplest way that two charged particles may
interact is to exchange one photon between them,
as pictured in the Feynman diagram of gure 1.
This diagram forms the basis for all calculations
in quantum electrodynamics, QED. One further,
and very important, fact is that the photon, being
a quantum of light, travels with the speed of
light, and therefore, according to the theory of
relativity, when considered as a particle, has zero
rest-massonly particles with no mass may travel
at the speed of light.
From Coulombs law to QED we have come
a long way. Electric charge is the source of a eld
(the electromagnetic eld); that eld is quantized
Figure 1. Two electrons exchange a photon.

and the quanta are photons; these particles have

zero mass. This is summarized in the rst entry of
table 1. (The other two entries are explained later.)
Electroweak theory
We have so far described the state of knowledge
holding up to about 1950. Over the next
20 years or so, remarkable progress was made
in elementary particle physics. Perhaps the most
well-known discovery is that protons and neutrons
are simply the lightest two particles of their type
(baryons); that there are hundreds of baryons, and
they are all composite particles, made of quarks.
That is indeed a dramatic development, but for our
purposes it is not the most interesting one. What
is the centre of our attention is not the structure of
protons, neutrons and other baryons, but nuclear
beta decay,
n p +e

+
e
in which a neutron decays into a proton, emitting
an electron and an anti-electron neutrino. This
process had been known for a long time and
studied intensively by Fermi. The question is,
what is responsible for the decay? Nothing
in physics simply happens; everything has a
cause, and in modern terminology we would say
that things happen by virtue of an interaction.
What interaction causes beta decay? It is
not electromagnetism, because neutrinos have no
charge and no magnetic moment, so do not
142 PHYS I CS EDUCATI ON March 2007
Charge
Figure 2. Two electrons exchange a Z particle.
e

Z
experience this interaction. It is not the strong
nuclear force, which is felt by protons and
neutrons and is responsible for nuclear stability;
but electrons do not experience this force, and
neither do neutrinos. Fermi hypothesized a new
type of interaction, which he called the weak
interaction. And then the question naturally arises
of what similarities might exist between the weak
interaction and the electromagnetic one. Is there
going to be a problem with action at a distance,
and if so is there a eld? What sort of eld? Can
its quanta (analogous to photons) be found?
Fermi took the view (sensible at the time)
that there was no eld involved in the weak
interaction. This was a point or contact
interaction, with no action at a distance involved.
Over the years, however, some disquiet grew over
Fermis theory. Considered as a quantum eld
theory it suffered from the more or less fatal
disease of non-renormalizability. Fermi did not
take this objection very seriously, but it worried
Glashow, Weinberg and Salam, who eventually
(and independently) devised an improved version
of Fermis theory, based on a generalization of
QEDin a sense, of Maxwells electrodynamics.
In fact it unied electromagnetism and the weak
interaction (into electroweak theory), with the
result that electrodynamics would no longer be (if
this theory were right) a stand-alone theoryand
charge would no longer be a stand-alone quantity.
The GlashowWeinbergSalam (GWS) the-
ory goes along the following lines. There are two
more conserved quantities, known as weak isospin
and weak hypercharge. Weak isospin is a vec-
tor quantity, but a vector in a three-dimensional
space, an abstract space whose third dimension
is related to electric charge. In some sense, then,
charge is being generalized to a vector quantity. If
weak isospin has three components, I
W
1
, I
W
2
and
I
W
3
, then the relationship between it, weak hyper-
charge Y
W
and electric charge Q is
Q = I
W
3
+
Y
W
2
. (5)
Weak isospin and weak hypercharge are both like
electric charge, in that they give rise to a eld. The
electron, for example, because it carries charge
Q, also carries values of I
W
3
and Y
W
, so will
act as the source of a weak hypercharge eld,
whose quanta are denoted X, and the I
W
3
eld, with
quanta W
0
. The particles of Nature (electrons,
protons, neutrons etc) possess values of all these
quantities and their weak interactions involve their
coupling with four elds W
+
, W
0
, W

and X. The
truly interesting thing about this theory, however,
is that the photon is actually a mixture of W
0
and
X
= sin
W
W
0
+cos
W
X,
(where
W
is known as the Weinberg angle). It is
this that makes the theory a unied theory of weak
interactions and electromagnetism. But since the
photon exists, so must the other (orthogonal)
mixture
Z = cos
W
W
0
sin
W
X.
The GWS theory actually predicts the masses of
the W and Z particles and they have been found
at CERN, at exactly the predicted mass. This
is summarized in the lower entries of table 1.
However, if the Z particle existsand it does
then there is another type of Feynman diagram
describing the interaction of two electrons. This is
shown in gure 2, in which the electrons exchange
between themselves a single Z quantumrather than
a single photon. Since the Z particle has a mass,
however, the corresponding potential is
V =
a
r
exp(r), =
m
Z
c

h
. (6)
This is of the form of a Coulomb potential, but is
exponentially damped over a distance 1/, where
depends on the mass of the Z boson. Since this
particle is very heavy (almost 100 times the proton
mass) the potential is of very short range, of the
order of 10
15
m, so only modies the Coulomb
potential at nuclear distances. Nevertheless, the
conclusion, of great signicance in any account
of charge, is that Coulombs law is not strictly
March 2007 PHYS I CS EDUCATI ON 143
L Ryder
Figure 3. A loop around a Dirac string.
Dirac string
g
trueit is a large distance approximation to the
GWS theory. (Finally, it might be useful to remark
that in the case of photon exchange rather than
Z exchange, m
Z
in (6) would be replaced by m

which is zero, so (6) reduces to the Coulomb form

(4), as expected.)
Discrete nature of electric charge
Why is the charge on the electron exactly equal and
opposite to that on the proton? This is sometimes
called the problem of charge quantization, a term
which I think inappropriate, since it is not clear
that it has anything to do with quantum theory.
Nevertheless the problem remains; why are all
charges integral multiples of a unit charge? A
few solutions to this problem have been offered.
None is entirely satisfactory, but Diracs solution,
to be briey described here, is an imaginative
and interesting one. In a nutshell, Dirac showed
that if single magnetic charges exist (magnetic
monopoles) then electric charges are indeed
integral multiples of a basic unitand this theory
does involve quantum theory!
If we draw the lines of electric eld strength
surrounding an electric charge, they diverge
radially from it: the charge is indeed the source
of the electric eld. In the usual Maxwell
electrodynamics, entities (atoms, molecules and
so on) quite often possess a magnetic moment,
but this is due to circulating electric charge,
rather than to two magnetic charges a nite
distance apart. It is conventionally believed that
single magnetic charges, or monopoles, do not
exist in Nature. But suppose one did exist.
What would happen? The rst thing would
be that Maxwells equations would have to be
modiedand everything follows from that. One
of Maxwells equations for magnetic induction B
is div B = B = 0. This is precisely the
statement that magnetic charges do not exist
magnetic eld lines do not diverge from any point,
as they would from a magnetic pole. It might
seem a simple matter to modify this equation and
write (up to some multiplicative constant)
B =
m
, where
m
is the density of magnetic
charge, but things are not quite so simple. The
point is that to manipulate Maxwells equations a
so-called vector potential A is introduced, whose
curl is the magnetic eld, curl A = A =
Bthe lines of B circulate round the lines of
A. This is more than a mathematical device,
for A has an importance in its own rightit is
for example crucial in quantum theory (QED).
But if lines of B circulate in some sense, this
means that they cannot diverge. In equations,
if B = A, then div B = div curl A =
( A) = 0. In words, the very act of
introducing a vector potential A guarantees that
B has no divergence, so magnetic charges cannot
exist. What do we do? Dirac found a clever
solution: we keep the potential A but allow it
to behave in a mathematically irregular wayto
become singular (innite) in some region. If this
happens then the proof that div B = 0 breaks
down, for that only holds for mathematically well-
behaved functions. Dirac showed that we can
chose A to be singular along a semi-innite line,
extending from the magnetic charge g to innity.
This line is known as the Dirac string. Dirac
now introduces quantum theory and asks what
happens to the wavefunction of a particle with
electric charge (say an electron) sitting in the eld
of a magnetic monopole. Of particular interest
is the phase of the wavefunction, where =
||e
i
. In the regions where A is well behaved
nothing of interest happens, but consider a circular
loop drawn around the Dirac string (gure 3). If
our electron takes a journey round this loop, on
returning to its starting point the wavefunction
must also return to its initial value, which means
that + 2n, where n is an integer. Now
comes the clever part of the argument. If the loop
were in any general position in space, not near the
string, the above argument could be extended by
noting that the loop could be made smaller and
smaller, and eventually shrunk to a point, meaning
that we must have n = 0, since otherwise would
be multivalued at that point. But the Dirac string
is a region where the vector potential A is innite,
which must mean that the string is a pathological
144 PHYS I CS EDUCATI ON March 2007
Charge
region, and the wavefunction of the electron there
must vanish identically. The string is a forbidden
region for the electron. This means that the loop
may be made smaller and smaller, but it cannot
be shrunk to a point, since that point would be on
the string, where the electron is forbidden. And if
the loop cannot be shrunk to a point, the argument
that n = 0 disappearsso n need not be zero,
though of course it must be an integer, 1, 2, etc.
When the rest of the physical reasoning is lled in,
the argument, that the phase of an electron, with
charge q, in the eld of a magnetic monopole with
magnetic charge g, is allowed to change by 2n
on traversing a loop round the Dirac string, results
in the quantization condition
qg = (1/2) n

hc; (9)
the product of electric and magnetic charges is
quantized, in units of 1/2

hc. Alternatively, we
may put
q = n

hc
2g
, (10)
and state the result that if any magnetic charge
exists, the electric charge of any other particle
must be quantized, as in (10) above.
This is the most spectacular argument for the
quantization of electric charge. The only thing
wrong with it is that it appears that magnetic
monopoles do not exist! They have been looked
for exhaustively but none has been found. So it
seems that Nature has not made use of this highly
imaginative theory. What a shame! But one lesson
that physicists have to learn and relearn is that in
their subject it is Nature that has the upper hand.
Charge and mass
Let me conclude by returning to our initial obser-
vation that an inverse square law described both
electric forces (` a la Coulomb) and gravitational
ones (` a la Newton)equations (1) and (2). We
have now seen that charge does not appear in Na-
ture as an isolated quantity, but rather is accompa-
nied by weak isospin and hypercharge, so that ac-
tual force between two electrons is not exactly of
the Coulomb form (1), but has an additional con-
tribution due to the Z boson, giving a force of a
similar form but exponentially damped, with the
result that it is not noticeable at distances greater
than nuclear distances. What about Newtons law?
Has that been modied? Indeed it has! Einstein,
in his theory of general relativity, suggested that
gravity is not really a force at all. It is simply a
manifestation of curved space. In his theory we
no longer say that the Sun goes round the Earth in
an (approximate) circle because the Sun exerts a
force on it; we say that the presence of the Sun (or
any heavy body) makes space curved. In a curved
space there are no straight lines (think of the sur-
face of a sphere, on which all lines are curved), so
the Earth goes on a natural path in this space,
which happens to be (in a good approximation)
a circle! What a miracle! Einsteins theory and
Newtons, however, do make different predictions.
In the case of Mercury, a planet with a rather ellip-
tical orbit, the difference between the predictions
is actually measurable, and it is Einsteins theory,
not Newtons, which agrees with experiment. So
the theories are very similar in their predictions,
but not identical, and, most importantly, Einsteins
theory is stated in a completely different language,
which makes no use of the notion of force at all.
So the seeming similarity of gravity and electric-
ity, through the inverse square law, turns out to be
a simple coincidencebut what a happy one!
In conclusion, charge turns out to be a rather
more interesting quantity than at rst appeared.
There is both more to it (in the shape of the
underlying electroweak theory) and less to it
(supercial similarity to gravity) than we thought.
The history of charge is a sub-history of the
story of 20th century physics, which generated
and continues to generateso much intellectual
excitement.
Received 2 November 2006, in nal form 24 November 2006
doi:10.1088/0031-9120/42/2/002
Lewis Ryder graduated in Physics from
St Johns College, Oxford and obtained a
PhD in Mathematical Physics from
Edinburgh University, during which time
he spent one year working on particle
physics at the Middle East Technical
University in Ankara. After an SRC
Fellowship he was a lecturer at Kent
University until his retirement. He is
interested in particle physics and general
relativity and has published textbooks on
elementary particles and symmetries and
on quantum eld theory.
March 2007 PHYS I CS EDUCATI ON 145