Beyond a very basic core the main content of undergraduate texts , the topics which appear in graduate-level textbooks and electronically pub-lished lecture notes depend strongly on the research background of the writer and whether he or she is a theorist or an experimenter. Others see it as an opportunity to introduce topics optics, plasma physics, astrophysics, biophysics, etc. Given the many uses of this foundational course, Modern Electrodynamics purposely contains much more material than can be comfortably covered in a two-semester course.
Presentations with quite different emphases can be constructed by making different choices from among the many topics offered for discussion. All instructors will omit various sections and probably entire chapters. In many cases, the same issue is examined from more than one point of view.
The mathematics of the subject is given its proper due, but the qualitative and physical arguments I provide may ultimately remain with the reader longer. The text is purposely repetitive. This is done both to reinforce key ideas and to help readers who do not read the text in chapter order.
My background as a condensed matter physicist appears in various places, including an emphasis on the practical rather than the formal aspects of microscopic averaging, a discussion of the limitations of the Lorentz model of dielectric and magnetic matter, and the presence of an entire chapter devoted to the experimentally important subject of quasistatics.
By and large, these are topics I was unwilling to relegate to the end-of-chapter homework for fear many readers would never see them. Finally, every chapter contains a large number of homework problems. These range from undergraduate-type drill problems to more challenging problems drawn directly from the research literature. Like most textbook authors, I emphasize that active engagement with the homework problems is an important part of the learning process.
My desired outcome is a reader who, after completion of a course based on this book, can comfortably read and understand if not necessarily reproduce in detail a non-trivial electromagnetic argument or calculation which appears in the course of his or her research or reading. Rather, it derives from the inclusion of topics which have attracted new or renewed attention in recent decades. Examples include collisions and energy exchange between charged particles, the method of virtual quanta, transition radiation, energy loss in matter, and classical models of the electron.
All of these are illustrative of the self-refreshing nature of a subject which is re-invented by every new generation to meet its needs. Finally, two choices I have made may give pause to some readers. One is my use of SI units throughout. The other is my use of the imaginary number i to impose the metric in special relativity. The technical rationale for using SI units is given in Section 2. An equally good reason is simply that this system has become the worldwide standard and nearly all undergraduate textbooks use it without apology.
However, because the physics literature is replete with books and research papers which use Gaussian units, Appendix B discusses this system and provides an algorithm to painlessly convert from SI to Gaussian and vice versa. It would have been impossible for me to write this book without help. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest.
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EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Charged particles in vacuum and the electrodynamics of continuous media are given equal attention in discussions of electrostatics, magnetostatics, quasistatics, conservation laws, wave propagation, radiation, scattering, special relativity, and field theory. Extensive use of qualitative arguments similar to those used by working physicists makes Modern Electrodynamics a must-have for every student of this subject.
In 24 chapters, the textbook covers many more topics than can be presented in a typical two-semester course, making it easy for instructors to tailor courses to their specific needs. Close to worked examples and 60 applications boxes help the reader build physical intuition and develop technical skill.
Nearly end-of-chapter homework problems encourage students to engage actively with the material. A solutions manual is available for instructors at www. Mathematical preliminaries; 2. The Maxwell equations; 3. Electrostatics; 4. Electric multipoles; 5. Conducting matter; 6. Dielectric matter; 7.
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