Charge (physics)
Physics property associated with symmetries / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about charge in the most general physics sense. For charge as relates to electrical phenomena, see electric charge. For other uses of charge, see Charge.
In physics, a charge is any of many different quantities, such as the electric charge in electromagnetism or the color charge in quantum chromodynamics. Charges correspond to the time-invariant generators of a symmetry group, and specifically, to the generators that commute with the Hamiltonian. Charges are often denoted by , and so the invariance of the charge corresponds to the vanishing commutator
, where
is the Hamiltonian. Thus, charges are associated with conserved quantum numbers; these are the eigenvalues of the generator
.
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