Monopole charge quantization or why electromagnetism is a U(1)-gauge theory

Mitchell, Jeffrey J.; Sengupta, Ambar N.

doi:10.1016/j.aop.2004.02.001

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

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“…In order to finish this introduction, we recall that over the years other approaches have been introduced in order to give an explanation of the quantization of the electric charge. They involve topological arguments [33,34,24,10], geometric quantization [37,29], path integral considerations [1], anomaly cancellations [2,15,12,14,7,16], Kaluza-Klein theory [25], a particular analysis of the Aharonov-Bohm potentials [4], loop quantization [11] or a particular quantum theory of the electric charge [38]. The Dirac quantization condition can be derived from the quantization of the total angular momentum [19] and can be related to the associativity of finite translations [23,30].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weak gauge principle and electric charge quantization

Minguzzi

Prieto

Almorox

2006

J. Phys. A: Math. Gen.

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Abstract.Starting from a weak gauge principle we give a new and critical revision of the argument leading to charge quantization on arbitrary spacetimes. The main differences of our approach with respect to previous works appear on spacetimes with non trivial torsion elements on its second integral cohomology group. We show that in these spacetimes there can be topologically non-trivial configurations of charged fields which do not imply charge quantization. However, the existence of a non-exact electromagnetic field always implies the quantization of charges. Another consequence of the theory for spacetimes with torsion is the fact that it gives rise to two natural quantization units that could be identified with the electric quantization unit (realized inside the quarks) and with the electron charge. In this framework the color charge can have a topological origin, with the number of colors being related to the order of the torsion subgroup. Finally, we discuss the possibility that the quantization of charge may be due to a weak non-exact component of the electromagnetic field extended over cosmological scales.

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