Plane waves Definition and 60 Threads

I already took 3 quarters of EM and I'm ashamed to say I didn't learn anything the final quarter, where we covered the most interesting topics. Bah. One thing that I'm still confused about are plane waves. I understand the description of a regular sine wave on string. If you wiggle it once...

expansion of polarized plane waves into spherical harmonics, please help! Hi all, I would like to get some guidance in how to expand a polarized (i.e. linear polarization) plane wave into a series of spherical harmonics. I am aware of the formula applying to scalar plane waves (please see...

Hi all, In quantum mechanics, it is postulated that the physical states of a system correspond to the points on the unit sphere in the associated Hilbert space. And yet, people freely talk about e.g. scattering of plane waves by a potential? What does e^{\mathrm{i} \vec{k}\cdot\vec{x}}...

What is the difference between "uniform plane waves" and "planes waves." Are these terms used interchangeably? What properties would a "non-uniform" plane wave have?

What is the menaing of "standing plane waves"? Hi All, For me, English is my second language and I am not good is waves also. Here is a passage from QM: "For all practical boundary conditions, the waves must be standing plane waves of all possible wavelengths and amplitudes" What is...

Okay, I'm a geek with a lot of time on my hands, so I'm going through all the problems in Sakuri. The problem: Calculate [x^2,p^2] . Simple enough. There are basically two fundamental attacks to do this. 1. Direct computation. I get that [x^2,p^2]=2i \hbar (xp+px) , which I got both by...

I would like to see some nice visualizations of plane waves. Has anyone a nice link or knows a book where to find such? For EM waves the perpendicular E and B vector span a plane at each instant of time, right? What if there would be only an electric field wave. Would there be also a...

We are asked to substitute a plane wave solution into the TDSE for V=0 and show that it satisfies the TDSE (this is straightforward). Does this mean the plane waves are only solutions to the TDSE if V=0, or do they have other significance? Also we show that the group velocity = v (the...

I found the intrinsic impedance but I'm not sure which equation to choose? Any suggestion? Thanks Express both E and H as functions of time for a 30-Mhz uniform plane wave propagating in the positive z direction in a lossless medium having \varepsilon = 20pR/m and \mu = 5 uH/m. E has only...

Yi(x,t) = A*Sin(kix - {&omega}it), where i = 1, 2, 3 Phase velocity for two wave can be given by v = (&omega + [&omega]')/(k + k') and group velocity u = (&Omega - &omega')/(k - k') but what about three waves? I'm not sure what to do for three waves. I've looked all over my text and...