PHY651.htm

Classical Electromagnetic Theory II

Professor Thomas Curtright
PHY753, Section G
11 January - 22 April 2016
MWF 2:30-3:20 room 203
Grade = HW + Midterm + Final

Time dependent E&B fields, multipole radiation, interaction of radiation with matter, radiation reaction, relativistic effects. More or less ...

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to critically analyze and solve --- in many cases exactly but otherwise as a sequence of controlled approximations --- almost any problem involving classical electricity and magnetism, and they will be able to exchange ideas and discuss thoughtfully specific topics involving this subject with their peers and other professional colleagues.

Home Work is due as assigned in class.

Midterm Exam, either in-class, 2:00-3:20 pm, Friday, 4 March, or take-home (to be decided).
Final Exam, either in-class, 2:00-4:30 pm, Wednesday, 4 May, 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 second half of Jackson.

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

Assignment #2: Read Jackson Chapter 6.

Assignment #3: Electromagnetic momentum in a medium, and the controversy about it, is discussed at length here. "Hidden" mechanical momentum is discussed here, but the subject is also not without controversy (see here and references therein).

Assignment #4: For a better appreciation of gauge transformations, read this and perhaps also this.

Assignment #5: Read Jackson Chapter 11. (Mind the units!)

Assignment #6: Read Jackson Chapter 9.

Assignment #7: Read Jackson Chapter 12, sections 1, 7, 10, and 11, and Jackson Chapter 14, sections 1, 2, and 3. (Mind the units!)

Assignment #8: Read Jackson Chapter 10. (Mind the units!)

Assignment #9: Read Jackson Chapter 16. (Again, mind the units!)

Assignment #10: Jackson discusses Hertz potentials very briefly in Chapter 6, Section 13. A thorough but accessible modern treatment that invokes concepts from differential geometry may be found here.

Assignment #11: Read about the first experiment to detect cyclotron radiation from a single electron, as described here.

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: