Material electromagnetic fields and material forces (Q873124)

The paper investigates balance laws in an electromagnetic continuum, within the frame of configurational mechanics of materials. The author uses a non-conventional variational approach to introduce material momentum and material stress for electromagnetic continuum, and to derive a balance equation for the total material momentum of the system (matter + field). According to this approach, the reference configuration of the system is allowed to vary, while the current configuration is kept fixed. The Lagrangian function is taken to depend on the inverse motion, electromagnetic potentials, polarization, magnetization and their local time and space derivatives. As usual, the material momentum is identified with canonical momentum associated with the used Lagrangian. The author derives expressions for material momentum and for material stress. Both contain extra terms compared to previous well-known expressions. Although the balance law for material momentum is invariant under gauge transformations of electromagnetic potentials, it turns out that the obtained expression for material momentum does not satisfy the same property, thus leading to indeterminacy. The author suggests to get rid of this indeterminacy by removing the above-mentioned extra terms.