ADVANCED ELECTROMAGNETISM
Academic year and teacher
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- Versione italiana
- Academic year
- 2015/2016
- Teacher
- GUIDO ZAVATTINI
- Credits
- 6
- Didactic period
- Secondo Semestre
- SSD
- FIS/01
Training objectives
- Knowledge of the special theory of relativity and of its experimental and conceptual bases. Ability to solve physical problems in 4-dimensional spacetime.
Knowledge of advanced classical electromagnetism and electrodynamics, including electromagnetic radiation, its generation and its interaction with charges. Prerequisites
- Physics 2 - Electromagnetism - at the undergraduate level
Course programme
- Electrostatic and magnetostatic fields and expansions in series of multipoles. Scalar and vector potentials. Field energy and momentum, Poynting vector, stress tensor. Maxwell's equations and their solutions in ordinary 3-dimensional space, with time-dependent charge and current distributions. Lienard-Wiechert potentials and fields, fields of velocity and of acceleration, radiation. Constant speed of light.
Minkowski's 4-dimensional space-time, Lorentz invariant. The Lorentz transformation and the relativity of simultaneity. Covariance of laws of physics, basic physical quantities in space-time: scalars, 4-vectors, 4-tensors.
Maxwell's equations in covariant form, and the electromagnetic field as a 4-tensor. Expansion of the radiation field in a series of multipoles. Classical electron theory. Emission of radiation from ultrarelativistic charged particles. Synchrotron radiation, Bremsstrahlung, Cherenkov effect.
Brief introduction to the Lagrangian formalism for the electromagnetic field. Didactic methods
- Lectures
Learning assessment procedures
- Oral exam. The student will be asked to answer questions on the concepts seen during the course and solve examples.
Reference texts
- Relativity:
Edwin F. Taylor, John A. Wheeler: "Spacetime Physics" , Freeman
Electromagnetism:
David Griffiths: Introduction to Electrodynamics
Melvin Schwartz: "Principles of electrodynamics", Dover
