Electromagnetic field theory Thide B.

Thide B.
Год: 2001
Издательство: Upsilon Books
Количество страниц: 209
Язык: Английский
Формат: PDF / RAR

Формат файла: RAR

This book is the result of a twenty-five year long love affair. In 1972, I took my first advanced course in electrodynamics at the Theoretical Physics department, Uppsala University. Shortly thereafter, I joined the research group there and took on the task of helping my supervisor, professor Per-Olof Fro-man, with the preparation of a new version of his lecture notes on Electricity Theory. These two things opened up my eyes for the beauty and intricacy of electrodynamics, already at the classical level, and I fell in love with it.
Ever since that time, I have off and on had reason to return to electrodynamics, both in my studies, research and teaching, and the current book is the result of my own teaching of a course in advanced electrodynamics at Uppsala University some twenty odd years after I experienced the first encounter with this subject. The book is the outgrowth of the lecture notes that I prepared for the four-credit course Electrodynamics that was introduced in the Uppsala University curriculum in 1992, to become the five-credit course Classical Electrodynamics in 1997. To some extent, parts of these notes were based on lecture notes prepared, in Swedish, by Bengt Lundborg who created, developed and taught the earlier, two-credit course Electromagnetic Radiation at our faculty.
Intended primarily as a textbook for physics students at the advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate level, I hope the book may be useful for research workers too. It provides a thorough treatment of the theory of electrodynamics, mainly from a classical field theoretical point of view, and includes such things as electrostatics and magnetostatics and their unification into electrodynamics, the electromagnetic potentials, gauge transformations, covariant formulation of classical electrodynamics, force, momentum and energy of the electromagnetic field, radiation and scattering phenomena, electromagnetic waves and their propagation in vacuum and in media, and covariant Lagrangian/Hamiltonian field theoretical methods for electromagnetic fields, particles and interactions. The aim has been to write a book that can serve both as an advanced text in Classical Electrodynamics and as a preparation for studies in Quantum Electrodynamics and related subjects.
In an attempt to encourage participation by other scientists and students in the authoring of this book, and to ensure its quality and scope to make it useful in higher university education anywhere in the world, it was produced within a World-Wide Web (WWW) project. This turned out to be a rather successful
move. By making an electronic version of the book freely down-loadable on the net, I have not only received comments on it from fellow Internet physicists around the world, but know, from WWW 'hit' statistics that at the time of writing this, the book serves as a frequently used Internet resource. This way it is my hope that it will be particularly useful for students and researchers working under financial or other circumstances that make it difficult to procure a printed copy of the book.
I am grateful not only to Per-Olof Froman and Bengt Lundborg for providing the inspiration for my writing this book, but also to Christer Wahlberg and Goran FAldt, Uppsala University, and Yakov Istomin, Lebedev Institute, Moscow, for interesting discussions on electrodynamics and relativity in general and on this book in particular. I also wish to thank my former graduate students Mattias Waldenvik and Tobia Carozzi as well as Anders Eriksson, all at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala Division, who all have participated in the teaching and commented on the material covered in the course and in this book. Thanks are also due to my long-term space physics colleague H elmut Kopka of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Aeronomie, Lindau, Germany, who not only taught me about the practical aspects of the of high-power radio wave transmitters and transmission lines, but also about the more delicate aspects of typesetting a book in TeX and LTeX. I am particularly indebted to Academician professor Vitaliy L. Ginzburg for his many fascinating and very elucidating lectures, comments and historical footnotes on electromagnetic radiation while cruising on the Volga river during our joint Russian-Swedish summer schools.
Finally, I would like to thank all students and Internet users who have downloaded and commented on the book during its life on the World-Wide
Web.