Viktor T. Toth - A covariant form of Maxwell's equations https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/289-a-covariant-form-of-...

Created: 12 January 2015

Given a four-potential , the Maxwell tensor is

Using the language of exterior forms, it is trivially easy to write down Maxwell's equations, and recognize them as
geometric identities:

It turns out that it is also possible to spell out a generally covariant form of Maxwell's equations using the conventional
indexed tensor notation. To do so, we first note that

so for a vector field, it is true that

Similar formulae can be developed for differential forms (and for totally antisymmetric tensors). For instance:

Using the above result, we can write the divergence of the Maxwell tensor as

which we can do because is totally antisymmetric. This divergence defines the current, i.e.,

These are Maxwell's equations known commonly in the form , .

To see how this form can be recovered, let us work in Minkowski spacetime ( , )
and in Cartesian coordinates, in which case

and

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Viktor T. Toth - A covariant form of Maxwell's equations https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/289-a-covariant-form-of-...

Current conservation is given by the equation , which we can also write, after multiplying by , as

or

In the case of the Minkowski metric and Cartesian coordinates, this becomes the well-known conservation equation
.

For the other two Maxwell equations, we form the dual of :

where is the totally antisymmetric Levi-Civita symbol and the extra division by is required to turn it into a unit
antisymmetric tensor in curved spacetime. The divergence of this (pseudo-)tensor is zero:

Once again, since is also a totally antisymmetric tensor, this expression can be written as

These are Maxwell's equations that we normally write in the form, , . To see how, once
again we can use Minkowski spacetime and Cartesian coordinates. Spelling out the components of the dual of the
Maxwell-tensor, we get

The divergence of this tensor is given by

To sum up, whereas these three-dimensional forms of Maxwell's equations are valid only in flat spacetime with a Cartesian
coordinate system, the following forms of Maxwell's equations are generally covariant and, better yet, they are expressed
in a form that is free of covariant derivatives or Christoffel-symbols:

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Viktor T. Toth - A covariant form of Maxwell's equations https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/289-a-covariant-form-of-...

Gauss's law and Ampère's law;

conservation law;

Gauss's law for magnetism, Faraday's law.

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