Please help me improve the course for next year by taking 10 minutes of your time to fill out the course survey! Thanks!
In addition, I am always extremely grateful to receive corrections for typos, or other mistakes in the lecture notes, example sheet model answers, course summary, etc.
We have now covered all of the material discussed in the Complete Course Summary
Here is a `bonus' example sheet to help with your revision and provide some extra practice at solving problems. I have provided the answers, but please don't look at the answer for any problem until you have made a very serious attempt to arrive at an answer and also tried every strategy you can think of to check your answer!
Bonus Example Sheet ...... Solutions.
You can find here a link to Jupyter notebooks for various animations of potentials,fields and radiation patterns produced by point charged particles that I use in the lectures. You may need to log in with a gmail or google account to be able to access the notebooks. The specific notebooks that are used in the lectures are 8,9,10,11,12 and 13. There are some others that are currently in development. These notebooks were written by my PhD student Dong Qichen - thanks very much to him for his work and Jupyter notebook expertise! You are welcome to run them in-situ in this (write-protected) area or you can copy them to your own space and modify your own copy. Citizen science: if you come up with any interesting modifications or new ideas, please feel free to let me know about them! Citizen responsibility: please edit code only in your own personal area!
Here is some General information on the course
Here is the Piazza link for this course
Will be updated here as we progress through the semester.
Week 1: Course Overview, Electrostatics Revision, and Consequences of the Finite Speed of Light
Week 2: Solutions to Laplace's Equation, Magnetostatics Revision, and Some Topics in Vector Calculus
Week 4: Special Relativity in the Minkowski Representation (Index Notation)
Week 6: Reading Week zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Week 7: The potentials and fields produced by a point charge moving with constant velocity
Week 8: More Equations of Electrodynamics in Lorentz-Covariant Notation and Local Conservation Laws
Week 9: Beginning Our Consideration of the Fields Produced by an Accelerating Point Charge
Week 10: The radiation produced by an accelerating point charge
Week 12: Harmonically varying sources
Here is a `bonus' example sheet to help with your revision and provide some extra practice at solving problems. I have provided the answers, but please don't look at the answer for any problem until you have made a very serious attempt to arrive at an answer and also tried every strategy you can think of to check your answer!
Bonus Example Sheet ...... Solutions.In solving these problems you may find the following very brief preliminary remarks on using index notation for vector calculus useful. In addition, here is a somewhat more extensive introduction to using index notation for vector calculus by John Crimaldi of University of Colorado, Boulder.
Optional Revision Exercises 2: Special Relativity (associated with Lecture 10 onwards, but can be attempted any time since they are based on 1st year material). ...... Solutions.D.J. Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics, (Cambridge University Press, 4th edition, 2017) ............... If you click on this link and sign in via your university account/password you get access to an e-book for this text.
M.A. Heald and J.B. Marion, Classical Electromagnetic Radiation, (Academic Press, 3rd Edition, 1995).
J.D. Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics, (John Wiley & Sons, 3rd edition, 1999).
R.P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume II, `Mainly Electromagnetism', (Addison Wesley, 1964).
A. Zangwill, Modern Electrodynamics, (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
G.B. Rybicki and A.P.Lightman, Radiative Processes in Astrophysics, (John Wiley & Sons, 1979)
M. Schwartz, Principles of Electrodynamics, (Dover Publications, 1972)
Here is a link to reading list for this course lodged at the John Rylands library. This includes a reference to the book "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by D.J. Griffiths, which is available `for free' to students on this course as an e-book from the library.
You may already be aware that the Feynman Lectures on Physics are available for free online from Caltech: Volume I, Volume II.
Here is the Course summary and some comments on the format and style of the exam ..... Please let me know if you find any typos or other mistakes!
A summary of useful formulae concerning vector calculus, coordinate systems, etc. (from D.J. Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics.)
A summary of physical constants and conversion factors between units (similar to that attached to physics and astronomy exams)
The syllabus for the course as given in the Blue Book
Local gauge invariance and the Schroedinger Equation: R. Barlow Eur. J. Phys. 11 (1990) 45.
Pictures of the electric and magnetic fields produced by a point charge moving with constant velocity
Proof of the general Lienard-Wiechert fields for a moving point charge (extra-curricular material - not needed for the exam)
Patterns of radiation produced by an accelerating point charge
The Jupyter notebooks for various animations of potentials,fields and radiation patterns produced by point charged particles. The specific notebooks that are used in the lectures are 8,9,10,11,12 and 13.
Material relating to past exams may be found on Blackboard.
Do you have any questions about the physics, the lectures, or the example sheets? Do you have any feedback on the lectures or other aspects of the course? Did you find any mistakes anywhere? I'd be very interested to hear from you!