ELECTRODYNAMICS

PHY 606

University of Maryland, College Park

Spring 2010


Instructor: Prof. Paulo Bedaque

                   bedaque at umd.edu

                   Physics building 2105


Grader:  Aleksanser Azatov


Books:   The Classical Electromagnetic Field, by L. Eyges (unfortunately out-of-print, but used nes are available cheap)
               Classical electrodynamics by J.D.Jackson (encyclopedic)
               Classical theory of fields by L. Landau and E.M.Lifshitz (elegant, high brow)
               Introduction to electrodynamics by D.J.Griffths (undergraduate but, if you know everything in it, you'll do just fine)
               The Classical Theory of Fields by L.Landau and E.M.Lifshitz (high brow, elegant; written by masters and it shows)
               Principles of Electrodynamics by Melvin Schwartz (elegant, short)
                          .  .  .                               (there are E&M books for all tastes in the library)



Time and place: Mondays and Wednesday, 2:00pm to 3:40pm


General remarks: Contrary to many other departments, we have only one semester of graduate E&M in Maryland. This is due, in part, to the fact that the mahematical theory of boundary value problems was already covered in the Mathematical Methods class. Consequently, we will concentrate on conceptual issues, electromagnetic waves and radiation. Static problems will be discussed, but briefly. The other peculiarity of our class is the stress we will put on some methods (lagrangian formalism, 4 dimensional tensors, ...)  that, besides usefull to understand E&M, will be particularly usefull in more advances classes.  We will not closely follow any textbook though.





Homework:

homework 1 solution

homework 2 solution

homework 3 solution

homework 4 solution

homework_5 solution

homework_6 soution

homework 7 solution

homework_8 solution

homework_9 solution

homework_10 solution problems 1,2 solution problem 3

Tests

midterm solution



Notes

Many typos/mistakes are known in these notes ! They are not a substitute for textbooks.

tensors, ...

electrostatics 

magnetostatics 

electromagnetic waves 

radiation

Interesting links:


Prof. K. MacDonald has a large set of lecture notes, problems, pedagogical articles and links on classical electromagnetism here.


This undergraduate lecture notes set by  by Prof. M. Peskin constains some material not usually covered in e&m classes like ours (coherence and holograms, Yang-Mills, rainbows, ...)

Tentative syllabus:


Relativity, four dimensional tensors;  lagrangians for fields and particles; Noether's theorem and conservation laws  ~ 3 lectures

Electrostatics ~ 6 lectures

Magnetostatics ~ 3 lectures

Electromagnetic waves; optics ~ 7 lectures

Radiation ~ 8 lectures

Magnetohydrodynamics ~ 1 lecture