New #electrodynamics #physics video - looking at reflection and transmission of electromagnetic waves. Snell's law and Brewster's angle.

New #electrodynamics #physics video - looking at reflection and transmission of electromagnetic waves. Snell's law and Brewster's angle.

#PhysicsFactlet
Scattering VS Extinction
In #Optics, the concepts of scattering and extinction are closely related. So closely related that many people tend to confuse them.
Imagine to illuminate a small object with a beam of light. If the object is small the scattered field will be essentially a spherical wave, and the total field will be the incident one plus the scattered field.
If we were able to measure directly the field (as we can do in the microwave regime) we could happily stop here, but in optics we can only measure intensities, and the intensity is defined as the time average of the modulus of the Pointing vector. In most cases of interest, the modulus of the Poynting vector is proportional to the modulus squared of the electric field (which explains why we often that a shortcut and just talk about |E|²).
So the quantity we measure is proportional to |Eᵢₙ +Eₛ|², which is the sum of the Poynting vector of the incident field, the Poynting vector of the scattered field, plus the cross terms. These cross terms are what we usually call "extinction" and are the result of the interference between the incident and scattering fields(and the reason why you get a "shadow" behind the scatterer).
Here is my lecture on EM plane waves for #electrodynamics #physics. Yes, I include a #python model for a plane wave


The identification of gravitation with a massless spin 2 field (the gauge group is the symmetry group of translations) requires to restrict the solutions of Einstein’s equations to the class of topologically trivial manifold. It is shown that the validity of this restriction in nature is supported by the present-day empirical facts. The identification has a drastic impact on cosmology, because the fulfilment of the cosmological principle is claimed to be improbable.
This is an interesting paper examining the transmission of DC current as ω→0 in the telegrapher's equation using the Heaviside step function.
Abstract—We explore the question of how direct current (DC) power is transmitted by electromagnetic fields in TEM/Quasi-TEM structures despite the static curl laws ∇ × E = 0 and ∇ × H = J. In this work we treat DC as the long-time limit of a causal step excitation.
I think this #physics #python video turned out better than I expected. Verifying Faraday's Law for #electrodynamics
