Electrical Engineering › Section Y · Time-varying fields, Maxwell's equations, and plane waves › Topic Y.7
Wave equations and types of waves
In a region free of charges and currents, Maxwell's four coupled equations collapse into a single wave equation for each field. Its solutions come in a few basic shapes, and the simplest, the plane wave, turns out to describe almost any wave seen far enough from its source.
In this topic
- From four equations to one
- Source-free and lossless
- The source-free equations
- Deriving the wave equation
- The wave equations and β
- Worked example: β in two media
- Phasefronts: three shapes of wave
- Locally planar waves
- Worked example: how planar is the wave?
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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