Electromagnetism

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This book leads students to learn electromagnetism and then moves to chapters about electric circuits. It aims to give an understanding of electromagnetism which gives a fast way to master the features of circuit elements such as resistors, capacitors, and coils that compose electric circuits. The author provides chapters on electromagnetism and electric circuits separately and gives a chapter explaining the correlation between them in detail.

The bibliography on electromagnetism is very rich and it may be necessary to justify our effort in writing a new text. The present text arose as a need when lecturing about the subject at Instituto Balseiro, in Bariloche, Argentina. We wanted to have a reference text for the most important topics covered in the course, which would also cover some aspects of interest for the applications of the concepts that the students have learned. follows one in classical mechan­ A course on electromagnetism usually ics. In the latter a brief introduction to the theory of relativity is normally included. During courses on electromagnetism this theory is traditionally pre­ sented again in brief form. This approach has the effect that, unless students later work on related topics, they do not acquire an appropriate knowledge of relativity. In this way, they lose perspective of the importance of one of the most beautiful and fascinating creations of physics in the twentieth cen­ tury. For this reason, we consider the properties of charges, currents and electromagnetic fields in vacuum, highlighting the relativistic transformation properties of each quantity.

Electromagnetismplaysanessentialrole,bothinbasicandappliedphysicsresearch. Thediscovery of electromagnetism as the unifying theory for electricity and magnetism represented a cornerstone in modern physics. From the very beginning, symmetry was crucial to the concept of unification: Electromagnetism was soon formulated as a gauge theory, in which a local phase symmetry explained its mathematical formulation. This early connection between symmetry and electromagnetism shows that a symmetry-based approach to many electromagnetic phenomena is recurrent, even today.

The aim of this book is to interpret all the laws of classical electromagnetism in a modern coherent way. In a typical undergraduate course using vector analysis, the students finally end up with Maxwell's equations, when they are often exhausted after a very long course, in which full discussions are properly given of the full range of applications of individual laws, each of which is important in its own right. As a result, many students do not appreciate how limited is the experimental evidence on the basis of which Maxwell's equations are normally developed and they do not always appre­ ciate the underlying unity of classical electromagnetism, before they go on to graduate courses in which Maxwell's equations are taken as axiomatic. This book is designed to be used between such an undergraduate course and graduate courses. It is written by an experimental physicist and is intended to be used by physicists, electrical engineers and applied mathematicians.