Minkowski's lost legacy and hadron electromagnetism.

We revisit Minkowski's lost legacy on relativistic electromagnetism in order to resolve long-standing puzzles over the charge distribution of relativistic systems like hadrons. Hadrons are unique relativistic electromagnetic systems characterized by their comparable size and Compton wavelength r h ∼ λ C. As such, it was recently realized that the traditional Sachs definition of the charge distribution based on a non-relativistic formula is invalid. We explain that this is the same problem pursued by Lorentz, Einstein and others, on the electromagnetism of a moving body. We show how various charge distributions proposed in hadronic physics naturally emerge as the multipole moment densities in the macroscopic theory of relativistic electromagnetism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]