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Ping Phil Hobbs

So I'm finding that I have a need to refresh my memory of classical electromagnetism, and I'm wondering if you could provide a reference. There are some areas that I feel I'm still comfortable with, and some areas which I'm not.

Areas I'm mostly comfortable with: Coloumb's law, electrostatics, Laplace/Possion's equations, electrostatic field energy, capacitance, electric/potential fields, basic principles of magnetics (faraday's law, ampere's law, biot-savart) magnetic field energy, electric and magnetic dipole moments, magnetic field energy, magnetic vector field, multipole expansion, basic low velocity electrodynamics

Areas I'm not comfortable with: physics of permanent magnets, dia, para, and ferromagentism, behavior of electric and magnetic fields in matter/polarizable media, EM waves, propagation, antenna theory, and the behavior of EM waves in dispersive and anisotropic media (how do Faraday cages work again?), the Maxwell stress tensor and the tensor formulation of classical EM in general, relativistic electromagnetism and the four-vector formulation, charged particle beams, relativistic charged particle beams and the problem of self-consistency, modern theories of superconductivity, the connection between classical EM and quantum field theory (virtual particles, etc.) and so on.

Any suggestions on reference that might focus on some of the latter topics more and less of the former? Thanks.

Reply to
bitrex
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I have a Good Books List on my web site,

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that talks about this some.

My usual references are:

John David Jackson, "Classical Electromagnetics". A good upper level/first year graduate text that does a very thorough and well-explained job of the vacuum and isotropic media cases, including relativity and so on.

Lev D Landau & Evgenii M Lifshitz, "The Classical Theory of Fields", has the best discussion of relativistic electrodynamics, iirc.

Landau & Lifshitz's "Electrodynamics of Continuous Media" is especially good on crystal optics and other sorts of anisotropy and weirdness.

Ralph Harrington, "Time Harmonic Electromagnetic Fields" and Simon Ramo, John Whinnery, and Theodore Van Duzer's "Fields and Waves in Communications Electronics" have unusual coverage and a lot of good things you won't find elsewhere, e.g. conservation of complex power and the radiation reaction concept, both of which lead to excellent physical insight and good calculation approaches, e.g variational methods.

Max Born & Emil WOlf, "Principles of Optics" is _the_ tome on optical calculations, from the ray, Fourier, and Maxwell viewpoints.

I haven't had to do a lot of practical magnetostatic theory in quite awhile, and have never done anything terribly complicated, e.g. spin glasses or the detailed quantum theory of permanent magnets beyond the Ising model. (My many-body quantum prof was more of a particle physicist than a solid state guy, so we didn't do much magnetics.)

I have some dozens of others that I use for specialized stuff such as vector diffraction, FDTD and waveguides--you can see almost the complete collection at

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Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Great, thank you for this.

Reply to
bitrex

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