Recent content by IxRxPhysicist

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    Suggestions for practice problems in E&M

    Hey all, I am working my way through a couple of emag books (Griffiths, Jackson, and Schwinger) and I was wondering if any of y'all have suggestions for problems that you thought were particularly physically insightful or useful. Cheers, IR
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    Solving Charge Distribution for Spheres with Different Material Properties

    Interesting, learned something new. I just learned mathematica so I guess I will put LaTex on my to do list. Thanks!
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    Solving Charge Distribution for Spheres with Different Material Properties

    Whoa whoa ρ can take on arbitrary units? Like Coulombs/cm3+n? The units just have to balance out in ∫ ρ dV = Q?...Also as an aside, are you using LaTex or something because I like the format in your response.
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    Solving Charge Distribution for Spheres with Different Material Properties

    Hey all, So the question in Jackson 1.4 is that I have 3 spheres that all have a total charge Q on them, but each sphere has different material properties. For instance, I have a conducting sphere, a sphere with a uniform charge distribution, and one with a charge distribution that has a...
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    Energy of the summation of two sinusoidal waves

    Lasers put out a certain definite (more or less) power over a certain amount of time or space (depending on the situation or what you are interested in). Think of the laser as a hose with a fixed flow, ignoring the incompressibility of water, you can think of interference as a repositioning of...
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    Energy of the summation of two sinusoidal waves

    Long story short, energy from an optical (electromagnetic) source is proportional to the irradiance at the point of measurement, in your case the point of constructive interference. The irradiance at the point of measurement is given by I_total = I_1 + I_2 + 2*sqrt(I_1*I_2)*cos(phase_1 -...
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    Antenna theory: needed foundation (online courses?)

    Hey all, I am trying to do a read through on antenna theory (using Constantine's book) and am wondering if there is any online course that might follow the book or serve as a good reference. I have found pretty good success in supplementing a book with an online course in the past (i.e...
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    What Does Sharp Mean in Quantum States?

    Hey all, I'm reading through an anecdotal work about the philosophical foundations of quantum field theory and the authors keep referring to states having the ability to be "sharp." As in it's possible for P to be sharp if the system is mixed, where P is some property of the system. Thanks! IR
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    Surface plasmon dependence on surface area to volume ratio

    Hey everyone, I was recently reading a paper on surface enhanced Raman scattering, and it mentioned that plasmons (and for that matter surface plasmon polaritons-where my interest lies) are sensitive to the surface to volume ratio of the structure. I can begin to understand intuitively with...
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    Physical intrepretation of contra-variant and covariant vectors?

    Thanks for the feedback everyone, I'm just going to leave this here:
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    Physical intrepretation of contra-variant and covariant vectors?

    Any suggestions on a manifold text?
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    Physical intrepretation of contra-variant and covariant vectors?

    Got it Kreyszig is best used as a paperweight.
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    Physical intrepretation of contra-variant and covariant vectors?

    I'm getting the impression that this is a TOmato-toMAto ambiguity.
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    Physical intrepretation of contra-variant and covariant vectors?

    This explains why it was published by Dover. But yes O'Neil's elementary differential geometry book.
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    Physical intrepretation of contra-variant and covariant vectors?

    Well you are on a physics forum but if you point me in the right direction I'll update my vocabulary, I don't wish to be ignorant.