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Physics
Classical Physics
Electromagnetism
Faraday effect breaks photon interaction laws
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[QUOTE="jasonRF, post: 6555287, member: 192203"] In a vacuum, classical electromagnetic waves do not interact. In matter they can of course interact. I'll stick to a plasma medium since it can include Faraday rotation. The typical derivation that explains the phenomenon begins with a fluid-theory description that is [I]linearized[/I] about a configuration that includes a DC magnetic field and DC charged particle densities. After linearization the model no longer includes wave-wave interactions that are present in the full nonlinear theory. This is not about being lazy. Rather, it allows us to quantitatively understand observations without doing a lot of unnecessarily complicated calculations. Using the full nonlinear theory to understand the propagation of short wave radio signals in the ionosphere would be silly - people who use that approach never accomplish much. When we are interested in a phenomena that are fundamentally nonlinear (such as wave-wave interactions), then we do not linearize the models. Sometimes other approximations help yield analytical solutions in these cases. edit: this is the picture that the linearized theory provides. Of course, the wave itself has a magnetic field component which will also deflect the electron, but that is captured in a nonlinear (second-order) term that will usually be much smaller than the first-order interaction of the electrons with the wave E-field and the first-order interaction of the electrons with the DC B-field. If the nonlinear term is large enough then the linearization is no longer justified. jason [/QUOTE]
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Classical Physics
Electromagnetism
Faraday effect breaks photon interaction laws
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