Symmetries, Conservation Laws, and Cohomology of Maxwell's Equations Using Potentials

New nonlocal symmetries and conservation laws are derived for Maxwell's equations in 3 + 1 dimensional Minkowski space using a covariant system of joint vector potentials for the electromagnetic tensor field and its dual. A key property of this system, as well as of this class of new symmetries and conservation laws, is their invariance under the duality transformation that exchanges the electromagnetic field with its dual. (In contrast the standard potential system using a single vector potential is not duality-invariant.) The nonlocal symmetries of Maxwell's equations come from an explicit classification of all symmetries of a certain natural geometric form admitted by the joint potential system in Lorentz gauge. In addition to scaling and duality-rotation symmetries, and the well-known Poincaré and dilation symmetries which involve homothetic Killing vectors, the classification yields new geometric symmetries involving Killing–Yano tensors related to rotations/boosts and inversions. The nonlocal conservation laws of Maxwell's equations are constructed from these geometric symmetries by applying a conserved current formula that uses the joint potentials and directly generates conservation laws from any (local or nonlocal) symmetries of Maxwell's equations. This formula is shown to arise through a series of mappings that relate, respectively, symmetries/adjoint-symmetries of the joint potential system and adjoint-symmetries/symmetries of Maxwell's equations. The mappings are derived as by-products of the study of cohomology of closed one-forms and two-forms locally constructed from the electromagnetic field and its derivatives to any finite order for all solutions of Maxwell's equations. In particular it is shown that the only nontrivial cohomology consists of the electromagnetic field (two-form) itself as well as its dual (two-form), and that this two-form cohomology is killed by the introduction of corresponding potentials.