Toroidal moment

In electromagnetism, a toroidal moment is an independent term in the multipole expansion of electromagnetic fields besides magnetic and electric multipoles. In the electrostatic multipole expansion, all charge and current distributions can be expanded into a complete set of electric and magnetic multipole coefficients. However, additional terms arise in an electrodynamic multipole expansion. The coefficients of these terms are given by the toroidal multipole moments as well as time derivatives of the electric and magnetic multipole moments. While electric dipoles can be understood as separated charges and magnetic dipoles as circular currents, axial (or electric) toroidal dipoles describes toroidal (donut-shaped) charge arrangements whereas polar (or magnetic) toroidal dipole (also called anapole) correspond to the field of a solenoid bent into a torus.