PHY650.htm

Classical Electromagnetic Theory I

Professor Thomas Curtright
PHY650, Section G
25 August - 9 December 2014
MWF 2:30-3:20 room 203
Grade = HW + Midterm + Final

Electrostatics, continuous media, magnetostatics, Maxwell's equations, resonant cavities, wave guides. More or less ...

Home Work is due as assigned in class.
Midterm Exam, either in-class, 2:00-3:20 pm, Wednesday, 15 October, or take-home (to be decided).
Final Exam, either in-class, 2:00-4:30 pm, Friday, 12 December, or take-home (to be decided).

Required text: John David Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics, Third Edition (Wiley, 1999) [Jackson errata].

Of course, you may also buy other texts, if you have the means, and you are encouraged to read other books if you have the time. In my opinion, Jackson is a great reference. It is a classic treatise on the subject. But I think it is not the best textbook for students. In any case, we hope to cover material taken mostly from the first half of Jackson. We will go through a systematic discussion of relativistic effects, and formalism, in PHY651.

Graded homework problems:
These will be due about one or two weeks after being assigned in lecture.

Reading assignments: Ideally, you should try to do all the exercises in the assigned Jackson chapters! But I will only collect for grading those homework problems listed above.

Assignment #1: Read Jackson, Introduction and Chapter 1.

Assignment #2: Read Jackson Chapter 2.

Assignment #3: Read Jackson Chapter 3.

Assignment #4: Read Jackson Chapter 4. Also see Journal of Mathematical Physics 28 (1987) 978-980.

Assignment #5: Read Jackson Chapter 5, and American Journal of Physics 19 (1951) 87-90; 22 (1954) 586-596; 78 (2010) 1117-1119.

Assignment #6: Read Jackson Chapter 6.

Assignment #7: Read Jackson Chapter 7.

Assignment #8: For fun and profit: Get the old E&M qualifier exams and solve them!

Other reading material:
    Some other textbooks.
    Some notes on various topics.
    A bit of history is here: Green, Maxwell, and Riemann.

The content of the course is given, in summary, by the Lorentz force law

and Maxwell's equations:
MATH

where

An exact expression for the Coulomb constant is: