The role of the virtual work in Faraday's law

Abstract

In the context of Faraday's induction law, we show that the concept of virtual work provides another point of view to clarify the nature of the induced electric field, as well as the fact that the integral over a closed path of the induced electric field is not the work performed by a unit charge. The usefulness of the concept of virtual conservativity is discussed. Further, we study the relation between the electromotive force and the real work done by an external agent to keep a circuit at constant velocity. From this discussion it is observed that magnetic forces can be non-conservative from the mathematical point of view, but can be treated as conservative for all practical purposes.