PhDeezNutz
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Did I inadvertently solve the octupole while trying to solve the quadrupole? I mean what is going on here.
Jackson is assuming a charge distribution with cylindrical symmetry, such as a spheroid (ellipsoid of revolution). At the beginning of the paragraph containing equation (9.50) he assumes "an oscillating spheroidal distribution of charge". Figure 9.2 refers to this case.PhDeezNutz said:@TSny I may be terribly misguided but this is what I'm thinking. If you look on page 416 (Figure 9.2) of Jackson he talks about a system that is a little bit different than the one we're dealing with but the impression I get is that each vertical plane has a quadrupole (4 lobe pattern)...
TSny said:Jackson is assuming a charge distribution with cylindrical symmetry, such as a spheroid (ellipsoid of revolution). At the beginning of the paragraph containing equation (9.50) he assumes "an oscillating spheroidal distribution of charge". Figure 9.2 refers to this case.
A "spheroid" is an ellipsoid of revolution. See here. As Jackson mentions, the nonzero components of the quadrupole moment tensor are the diagonal elements. These satisfy ##Q_{11} = Q_{22}= -\frac{1}{2}Q_{33}##. We imagine that somehow these components vary harmonically in time.PhDeezNutz said:I’m having trouble imagining what that means. Would that mean
##\rho (\vec{r}’) = \frac{3Q}{4 \pi R^3} e^{-i \omega t}##
It seems not much different than a point charge and I was under the impression that point charges don’t radiate unless accelerated.
TSny said:Yes, that looks very nice. It would be interesting to see some of the near field behavior. Good work!
TSny said:I've never worked with magnetic quadrupoles. Jackson doesn't appear to give any explicit expressions for magnetic quadrupole moments. I did find the following expression in Morse and Feshbach's Methods of Mathematical Physics for a general distribution of current density ##\vec J##:
##\mathbf{M} = \frac{1}{2}\int\left[ \vec r (\vec r \times \vec J) + (\vec r \times \vec J) \vec r \right] d^3r##
This is dyadic notation. Thus to get ##{M}_{xy}##, you dot the integrand from the left with a unit vector in the x-direction and dot the integrand from the right with a unit vector in the y-direction. So,
##M_{xy} = \frac{1}{2} \int \left[x(zJ_x-xJ_z) + (yJ_z-zJ_y)y\right]d^3r##
## \,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,= \frac{1}{2} \int \left[ (y^2-x^2)J_z + xzJ_x - yzJ_y \right] d^3x##
##M_{zz} = \int \left( zxJ_y - zyJ_x \right) d^3r##
etc.
The dimensions of ##M## are current times distance cubed; whereas, the dimensions of your expression for ##M_{ij}## are current times distance to the fourth.
I applied this dyadic definition to the case of a magnetic quadrupole formed from two current loops with opposite currents.
View attachment 257972
I got the same result for the magnetic quadrupole moment components as given in this link. See pages 9 through 11. The final result is at the bottom of page 11.
The vector potential ##\mathbf A## produced by this quadrupole is given by the last term shown in the equation at the top of page 11. But this is only for the far field. I would imagine that the near field would be very tedious to work out.
TSny said:Nice. That could be right. I don't have much experience with this. But look at the figure on page 8 here. You can see a sketch of the radiation pattern for the two circular current loops. There is no radiation in the horizontal direction (in the xy plane) and no radiation in the z-direction. That looks like what you are getting.
for i = 1:3
for j = 1:3
for k = 1:3
Q(i,j,k) = 0;
for i1 = 1:length(PCQ)
Q(i,j,k) = Q(i,j,k) + PCQ(4,i1)*PCQ(i,i1)*PCQ(j,i1)*PCQ(k,i1);
end
end
end
end
I think I may have populated the electric octupole tensor wrong because I'm getting all negatives.TSny said:Your "hand-wavy" arguments sound good to me.
I agree that there are 12 lobes. I decided to try using the approach to multipole radiation fields given in chapter 16 of Jackson's 2nd edition. I believe this material is covered in chapter 9 of Jackson's 3rd edition in a somewhat condensed form compared to the 2nd edition.
Using this approach I attempted to produce a plot showing the time-averaged power radiated in different directions. For the "cube" octupole I get the following surface. (If you pick a point on the surface, the power radiated in the direction from the origin to that point is proportional to the distance of the point from the origin.) So, the power is mostly radiated into 4 "upper" lobes, 4 "lower" lobes, and 4 "horizontal" lobes. The lobes point toward the midpoints of the edges of the cube.
View attachment 259830
There is no radiation in the 14 directions that you found. So, this seems to corroborate your results.