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Currently the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron is known to 10 orders of magnitude.

However, i'm curious if:

  1. Are there any experiments trying to bound the anisotropy of this ratio for different directions of space? Over what time does the data needs to be averaged to get to our current ten-figure precision? Less than a day? Less than a second? Less than a month?

  2. Does an spatial anisotropy (or an spatial inhomogeneity) of this ratio break Poincare symmetry, or can that be restored with replacing the mass scalar with a tensor object? Also, what theoretical ideas explicitly disallow a non-scalar fundamental mass? What about a non-scalar electromagnetic charge?

  3. Does mass spectroscopic experimental data bound any anisotropic variations? Do we have any measurements of this ratio on small cavities where van der waals forces are dominant?

Sklivvz
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lurscher
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1 Answers1

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You ask in the comments to the main question:

"how sure are we (quantitatively, and theoretically) that mass and charge are scalar constants" .

Our concept of mass has developed from classical mechanics, the same with charge and classical electrodynamics. If charge and/or mass behaved differently at different times in different locations we would have noticed experimentally and would have developed different classical mechanics and electromagnetism.

Mass and charge are assumed to be scalar in QM as continuation of the classical mechanics attributes. The many and accurate measurements of e/m allow very little leeway to a different interpretation, within measurement errors.

anna v
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