Section 5.6 · Further exercises · 6 of 20
Exercise 5.6.6: Which fields are allowed?
About the further exercises of Section 5.6
Twenty further exercises in the spirit of the problems, the worked examples and the home exercises, graded from easy to harder within two groups. Exercises 5.6.1–5.6.10 belong to the lecture: Exercises 5.6.1–5.6.2 are about phasors and the phase velocity, 5.6.3–5.6.5 about the complex permittivity and the wave number, 5.6.6–5.6.7 about the Helmholtz equation and 5.6.8–5.6.10 about power. Exercises 5.6.11–5.6.20 belong to the exercise lecture: reading time-harmonic fields, loops, mixers and receivers, power, and the medium found from measurements. They use only
and, from Section 6.1, the instantaneous and the complex Poynting vectors and , with , and the time-harmonic Poynting relation
with the time-average energy densities and (real , ). For a wave every becomes , so Faraday's law gives . A small loop of turns and area in a field of angular frequency picks up an emf of amplitude , with its normal.
Which fields are allowed?
#In a source-free region of free space at three electric field phasors are proposed:
For each, check the Helmholtz equation and and decide whether it can exist there. For a field that is rejected, find the charge density it would need. For (c) find and .
The Helmholtz equation was derived with already used, so a source-free field must satisfy both and . Here and .
, and . Allowed: a plane wave travelling along with , its field normal to that direction.
, but . Not allowed: the field points along its own direction of variation, and it would need the charge density
and . Allowed. Faraday's law with gives
is real and purely imaginary, so is purely imaginary and .
(c) is a superposition of four plane waves: with , , each with the wave vector of length .
Field (c) vanishes on the planes and , so it can live inside a metal pipe with walls there. The four plane waves bounce between the walls and form a standing pattern that carries no average power, like the standing wave in front of a metal wall (Section 6.3), and like the fields of the waveguides of Chapter 7. Field (b) would have to drag a wave of charge density along with it, so it cannot exist in empty space.
cf. Problem 5.6.7