Coulomb's law in maximally symmetric spaces

Abstract

We study the modifications to the Coulomb's law when the background geometry is a $n$-dimensional maximally symmetric space, by using of the $n$-dimensional version of the Gauss' theorem. It is shown that some extra terms are added to the usual expression of the Coulomb electric field due to the curvature of the background space. Also, we consider the problem of existence of magnetic monopoles in such spaces and present analytical expressions for the corresponding magnetic fields and vector potentials. We show that the quantization rule of the magnetic charges (if they exist) would be applicable to our study as well.