Strong gravitational force induced by static electromagnetic fields

Abstract

It is argued that static electric or magnetic fields induce Weyl-Majumdar-Papapetrou solutions for the metric of spacetime. Their gravitational acceleration includes a term many orders of magnitude stronger than usual perturbative terms. It gives rise to a number of effects, which can be detected experimentally. Four electrostatic and four magnetostatic examples of physical set-ups with simple symmetries are proposed. The different ways in which mass sources enter and complicate the pure electromagnetic picture are described.