This is the main web-page for the course Electrodynamics PHYS30441 (M). Material will appear here as we progress through the course.
The interactive sessions scheduled for Mondays 9:00 and Wednesdays 11:00 will be used in a fairly flexible fashion. I shall use some of these sessions to give "live" lectures on some of the core material. In addition, we'll use some interactive sessions to have informal "worked examples"-style sessions. By design, these will be INTERACTIVE; I'll be asking for students to contribute ideas towards solving the problems (which generally will be adapted from past exam papers).
The programme for each week's face-to-face sessions scheduled for Mondays 9:00 and Wednesdays 11:00 will be advertised at least one week in advance on the course web-site.
N.B. Each week I shall make explicitly clear which mini-lectures are "duplicated" by a live lecture and, if appropriate, which mini-lectures need to be followed on-line, because the material is not covered in a live lecture.
I know that some people would like to get an overview of where the course will be going. In addition, I know that some people like to work a bit ahead of the official timetable. In this spirit, I provide here a single web-page giving a Complete List of Pre-Recorded Mini-Lectures and "One-Page Summaries" from the course.
In the same spirit, I provide here my current working version of the complete Course Summary.
Please be aware that I shall be making some small changes to the lecture material and the order in which it is presented. I shall be making updates to this document as we progress through the course. N.B. This document is intended to provide a very concise summary of the main results. It is NOT a textbook! For recommended text books see the list given in the course reading list, as well as the week-by-week web-pages for more specific reading recommendations.
We'll be using Piazza for online Questions and Answers. Please click on the Piazza link for this course to get started. In order to help me (and your fellow students) help you, please try to make your question as clear and specific as possible when you type it into Piazza! For example, if you have a query about one of the examples sheets, please give the question number. Please distinuguish between the "examples class" and the "additional examples" sheets. If you are asking about an exam question, then in order to avoid ambiguity please specify the year by saying "January 20xx". (This avoids a possible confusion with the year in which the relevant lectures were delivered.)
If you are looking for some material to help you prepare for the course, here are a couple of (optional, but very useful) exercise sheets to help you revise/practice vector calculus and special relativity:
Optional Revision Exercises 1: Vector CalculusThere are several ways of solving such vector calculus problems. I suggest you pick on at least one problem and practice solving it in two ways: (i) explicitly considering the x (cartesian coordinate) component of the vector equations; (ii) using general index notation for vectors.
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 Mini-Lecture 10 onwards, but you can attempt these any time, because they rely only on first year relativity) As revision of some of the basic mathematical tools we shall be using it might be useful to take a quick look at:A summary of useful formulae concerning vector calculus, coordinate systems, etc. (from D.J. Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics.)
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
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).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!