Lorenz or Coulomb in Galilean electromagnetism?

INLN-UMR 6618 CNRS - 1361 route des Lucioles 06560 Valbonne, France

Received: 23 February 2005
Accepted: 3 May 2005

Abstract

Galilean electromagnetism was discovered thirty years ago by Lévy-Leblond and Le Bellac. However, these authors only explored the consequences for the fields and not for the potentials. Following De Montigny et al. , we show that the Coulomb gauge condition is the magnetic limit of the Lorenz gauge condition whereas the Lorenz gauge condition applies in the electric limit of Lévy-Leblond and Le Bellac. Contrary to De Montigny et al. , who used Galilean tensor calculus, we use orders of magnitude based on physical motivations in our derivation.