An alternative formulation of the magnetostatic boundary value problem

Abstract

We present an alternative formulation of the magnetostatic boundary value problem which is useful for calculating the magnetic field around a magnetic material placed in the vicinity of steady currents. The formulation differs from the standard approach in that a single-valued scalar potential, plus a vector field that depends on the given currents but not on the magnetic material, are used to obtain the total magnetic field instead of a magnetic vector potential. We illustrate the method by a few sample computations.