Potential

The mathematical study of potentials is known as potential theory- The study of harmonic functions on manifolds.
This mathematical formulation arises
from the fact that, in physics, the scalar potential is irrotational, and thus has a vanishing Laplacian — the
very definition of a harmonic function.
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In physics, a potential may refer to the scalar potential or to the vector potential. In either case, it is a field defined in space, from which many important physical properties may be derived.