Lecture Notes

The following notes (in PDF format) summarise the course. More detailed discussion of this material will be presented in the lectures, and the course of the lectures may not follow exactly that of the notes. Lecture Notes 7 and 8 will be covered in one week. There may be some revision of these notes during the 2008/9 course in order to match the lectures more closely.


Lecture Notes 1: Historical background, vector calculus, Maxwell's equations, energy and momentum. Magnetic monopoles.

Lecture Notes 2: Linear media, polarisation and magnetisation, Maxwell's equations in matter, boundary conditions, energy and momentum, the Clausius-Mossotti relation, solved problems.

Lecture Notes 3: Plane waves, polarisation, dispersion, the Kramers-Kronig relations.

Lecture Notes 4: Scalar and vector potentials, the inhomogeneous wave equation, the delta function, the Green function.

Lecture Notes 5: Radiation from a generalised localised source, electric dipole radiation, magnetic dipole radiation and higher order terms, radiation from an antenna.

Lecture Notes 6: Scattering, scattering from a small scatterer, many scatterers, scattering from the sky, the Born approximation, Rayleigh's explanation for the blue sky, critical opalescence, the optical theorem. Supplementary Notes.

Lecture Notes 7: Special relativity, four vectors, time dilation and the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, the four-velocity, energy and momentum, covariant and contravariant vectors, tensors.

Lecture Notes 8: The charge-current density four-vector, the Lorentz force, the potential four-vector, the field strength tensor, the dual field strength tensor, the energy-momentum tensor.

Lecture Notes 9: Fields from a static source and a moving charged particle, the Lienard-Wiechert potentials, motion in a circle.

Lecture Notes 10: The Lagrangian and Hamiltonian for a charged particle and the electromagnetic field, the canonical and symmetric stress tensors, the conservation laws, the field as an ensemble of oscillators.

Lecture Notes 11: Discussion of two modern fields where topics presented in this course feature:
(1) The Standard Model. (2) Duality, Gravity and M-Theory.

These notes are revised versions of the lecture notes for this course which were originally written by Prof. John M Charap. Any errors are this author's responsibility. This page was last updated on 10/06/08.