Classical electrodynamics
Course notes
These are materials from a course I gave to Physics and Astronomy graduate students in Fall-2019 at the University of Groningen. I took the syllabus and structure from Rybicki & Lightman. The notes provide a more detailed explaination- sometimes filling in intermediate steps in derivations but oftentimes elucidating the physical intuition behind the phenomena. I also credit consulting Jackson's book (classical electrodynamics) and Landau & Livshits (classical theory of fields) in preparing for this course.
Basic measures of radiation (radiance, flux density), quantifying absorption and emission of radiation, the equation of radiative transfer, thermal and blackbody emission, Planck's law, Kirchhoff's law
Lorentz force on charged particles, electric and magnetic fields, Electroganetic waves in vaccum, Harmonic representation of electromagnetic fields, Work done on charges by fields, energy density of electric and magnetic fields, Poynting's theorem, Harmonic representation of EM fields, Scalar and vector potentials, Lorentz guage condition.
Retarded potentials of a charge, Electric field of an accelerating charge, Poynting flux from accelerating charges, Larmor's formula, dipole approximation, spectrum of radiated fields, Thomson scattering.
Lorentz transformations, time dilation and length contraction, transformation of velocity and acceleration, aberration of light, relativistic generalization of Larmor's formula, four-current, four-wavevector, four-potential, relativistic doppler shift, transformation of electromagnetic fields, trasnformation of intensity, flux-density, absorption and emission co-efficents.
Basics of Coulumb collisions, energy radiated in a Coulumb collision, thermal free-free emission and absorption.
Power radiated by relativistic charges in an external magnetic field, spectrum and polarisation of synchrotron emission, relationship of bulk emissivity and absorption coefficient to Einstein coefficients, synchrotron absorption.
Linear reeponse of a medium to EM fields, dielectric tensor, wave dispersion in an ideal plasma, dielectric tensor of a magnetized plasma, Faraday effect.