Phys 412, Classical Electrodynamics II, Fall 2010


  • This course is being offered to students of the 7th semester at IISER Pune. It is being taught by Dr Prasad Subramanian.


    The course is a followup to Classical Electrodynamics I, and will generally cover electromagnetic radiation and allied aspects. It will cover the propagation of radiation (dispersion, for instance), tensor calculus and the covariant formulation of electrodynamics and radiation by moving charges. It is unlikely that we will have time to cover topics in radiation propagation such as waveguides and antennas, scattering and diffraction.

    You are expected to be familiar with Maxwell's equations, and with mathematical techniques such as boundary value problems for partial differential equations, Fourier analysis and basic vector analysis.

    The following is the list of books/resource materials that will be used:

    (parts of) Chapters 10, 11 and 12 from An Introduction to Electrodynamics, Griffiths

    (parts of) chapters 7, 10, 11, 12 & 14 from Classical Electrodynamics, J. D. Jackson (Wiley Eastern, third edition).

    (parts of) Chapters 1, 4, 5, 8 & 9 from The Classical Theory of Fields, Landau & Lifshitz (Butterworth & Heinemann, fourth revised edition).

    (parts of) The on-line Electrodynamics textbook by Bo Thide.

    (parts of) Chapters     1, 3 and 4 from Radiative Processes in Astrophysics, Rybicki & Lightman

    We will have 3 guest lectures on magnetohydrodynamics on Oct 20, 22 and 25 by Prof K Subramanian from IUCAA

    The grading will be based on one quiz (15%), one midterm (30%) and one final exam (35%), and a presentation (20%). The quiz will likely be closed book one, and the midterm and final exams will be open book.


     Here is a collection of papers that can be used as resource material for your presentations.

    Here is a short derivation of the Kramers-Kronig relations.

    Problem Set

    Prob 10.11, Griffiths
    Probs 6.10, 6.11, 6.12, Jackson
    Fill in details of Eq 7.58, Eq 7.86, Eq 7.91, Jackson
    Problems 7.5(a), 7.6(a), 7.12, 7.19, 7.20, 7.21, Jackson
    Understand Eq 8.34, derive Eq 8.138, Jackson
    Prob 9.27, 9.38, Griffiths, 8.4(a), 8.17(a), Jackson
    Prob 9.8 (a), (b), Jackson