Lecture Notes

Lecture Notes

PHY 415: Electromagnetic Theory I
Prof. S. Teitel stte@pas.rochester.edu ---- Fall 2008

Lecture Notes

My hand written class lecture notes are being scanned and uploaded for you to view. Please be warned that these are the notes I prepare for myself to lecture from - they are not in general carefully prepared for others to read. I make no guarantees about their legibility, or that they are totally free of errors. I hope, nevertheless that you will find them useful. The lectures are uploaded as pdf files, so you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to read them. You can download Acrobat Reader for free here.

The lecture note files correspond roughly to the material presented in a given day's lecture. But you may on occassion find the end of one day's lecture at the start of the file for the next day's lecture, so please look there if you think there might be something missing.

Lecture 0 - A brief history of electromagnetism
Lecture 1 - From Coulomb to Maxwell: Coulomb' law, superposition, the electric field, Maxwell's equations for electrostatics
Lecture 2 - Coulomb to Maxwell continued: magnetostatics, Lorentz force, Biot-Savart law, local charge conservation, Faraday's law, Maxwell's correction to Ampere's law, the complete Maxwell's equations, electromagnetic waves, systems of units
Lecture 3 - Electromagnetic scalar and vector potentials, gauge invariance, the Lorentz gauge, the Coulomb gauge
Lecture 4 - Longitudinal and transverse parts of a vector field, quick review of Fourier transforms, the Greens function, the Coulomb problem as a boundary value problem, properties of a conductor in electrostatics, boundary conditions at a charged surface
Lecture 5 - Boundary conditions at a charged surface continued, examples, Green's identities, uniqueness of solutions
Lecture 6 - The image charge method
Lecture 7 - Separation of variables in rectangular and cylindrical coordinates
Lecture 8 - Separation of variables in spherical coordinates
Lecture 9 - Multipole expansion: monopole, dipole moment, quadrapole tensor
Lecture 10 - Magnetostatics and the magnetic dipole approximation
Lecture 11 - Magnetostatic boundary value problems and the magnetic scalar potential
Lecture 12 - Macroscopic Maxwell equations: dielectric materials, bound charge, the electric displacement field D
Lecture 13 - Macroscopic Maxwell equations: magnetic materials, bound currents, magnetization density, magnetic field H
Lecture 14 - Bound currents, boundary conditions and macroscopic Maxwell equations, linear materials, dielectric constant and magnetic permeability
Lecture 15 - Clausius-Mossati equation, linear dielectric examples, bar magnets
Lecture 16 - Energy conservation in electromagnetism, Poynting vector
Lecture 17 - Electrostatic and magnetostatic energy, momentum conservation, Maxwell stress tensor, capacitance matrix
Lecture 18 - Inductance matrix, [not done in lecture, but still lots of fun: force, torque, energy of electric and magnetic dipoles in an external field; electrostatic and magnetostatic energies of interaction], electromagnetic plane waves in a vacuum
Lecture 19 - Frequency dependent atomic polarizability and dielectric function, harmonic plane waves in a dielectric
Lecture 20 - Waves in dieletrics: transparent propagation, resonant absorption, total reflection; waves in conductors: conduction electron current and charge density, ac conductivity
Lecture 21 - Waves in conductors: effective dielectric function, "good metals", skin depth, plasma frequency, plasma oscilations; polarization
Lecture 22 - Elliptically and circularly polarized waves, reflection and transmission at interfaces, Snell's law, total internal reflection, transmission into an absorbing medium
Lecture 23 - Reflection coefficients, total reflection, Brewster's angle, Kramers-Kronig relation
Lecture 24 - Green's function for the inhomogeneous wave equation, the Lienard-Wiechert potentials for a moving point charge
Lecture 25 - Electromagnetic potentials for a point charge moving with constant velocity, radiation from an oscillating current source: electric dipole, magnetic dipole, and electric quadrapole terms
Lecture 26 - Fields, Poynting vector and radiated power from elecric dipole, magnetic dipole and electric quadrapole radiation; fields and radiated power from arbitrary time varying sources in the electric dipole approximation; Larmor's formula for power radiated by a moving charge
Lecture 27 - Special relativity, Lorentz transformations, 4-vectors, proper time, 4-current, 4-potential, field strength tensor, Maxwell's inhomogeneous equations in Lorentz covariant form
Lecture 28 - Maxwell's homogeneous equations in Lorentz covariant form, transformations of E and B fields, kinematics, the energy-momentum 4-vector, Minkowski 4-force, Lorentz force revisited, relativistic Larmor's formula