Arun
Last Activity: 6 Years ago
Gauss's Law for magnetism tells us that magnetic monopoles do not exist. If magnetic monopoles existed, they would be sources and sinks of the magnetic field, and therefore the right-hand side could differ from zero.
Gauss's Law for magnetism is one of the four Maxwell's equations, which form the foundation for the entire theory of classical electrodynamics.
The theoretical implications of Gauss's Law for magnetism are staggering. Since the divergence of the magnetic field is zero, we can write the magnetic field as the curl of another vector field, which we call the vector potential:
B=∇×A
The magnetic vector potential is very important theoretically. Many expressions in classical electrodynamics are simpler when expressed in terms of the magnetic vector potential, for example. The magnetic vector potential is amenable to a multipole expansion. The magnetic vector potential relates the kinetic and conjugate momenta of a charged particle in an electromagnetic field. And in quantum electrodynamics, we regard the electric potential and the magnetic vector potential as constituting the "true" electromagnetic field, rather than E and B.
Regards
Arun (askIITians forum expert)