Related papers: Improving student understanding of electrodynamics…
Nearly all field theories suffer from singularities when particles are introduced. This is true in both classical and quantum physics. Classical field singularities result in the notorious self-force problem, where it is unknown how the…
Light Polarization has many technological applications and its discovery was crucial to reveal the transverse nature of the electromagnetic waves. However, despite its fundamental and practical importance, in high school this property of…
A common learning goal for modern physics instructors is for students to recognize a difference between the experimental uncertainty of classical physics and the fundamental uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Our studies suggest this…
The effects of reflecting boundaries on vacuum electric field fluctuations are treated. The presence of the boundaries can enhance these fluctuations and possibly lead to observable effects. The electric field fluctuations lead to voltage…
We investigate theoretical properties of beams of light with non-uniform polarization patterns. Specifically, we determine all possible configurations of cylindrically polarized modes (CPMs) of the electro-magnetic field, calculate their…
Expectation values of the electromagnetic field and the electric current are introduced at space-time resolution which belongs to the quantum domain. These allow us to approach some key features of classical electrodynamics from the…
The thermodynamical properties of a quantized electromagnetic field inside a box with perfectly conducting walls are studied using a regularization scheme that permits to obtain finite expressions for the thermodynamic potentials. The…
In this paper we consider a model of the Dirac vacuum in classical electromagnetic fields at positive temperature. We adopt the Pauli-Villars regularisation technique in order to properly define the free energy of the vacuum, extending the…
Classical electrodynamics uses a dielectric constant to describe the polarization response of electromechanical systems to changes in an electric field. We generalize that description to include a wide variety of responses to changes in the…
In a recent Foundations of Physics paper [5] by the current author it was shown that, when the self-force problem of classical electrodynamics is properly solved, it becomes a plausible ontology underlying the statistical description of…
The problems considered refer to the material equations of electric- and magnetoelectric induction. Some contradictions found in fundamental studies on classical electrodynamics have been explained. The notion magnetoelectric induction has…
Quantum electrodynamics near a boundary is investigated by considering the inertial mass shift of an electron near a dielectric or conducting surface. We show that in all tractable cases the shift can be written in terms of integrals over…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
The Doppler effect has many applications in science and engineering fields. Although the format of the classical Doppler effect equation is simple, the derivation for the equation in physics textbooks is not intuitive to many students. This…
We introduce phenomenological understanding of the electromagnetic component of the physical vacuum, the EM vacuum, as a basic medium for all masses of the expanding Universe, and "Casimir polarization" of this medium arising in the…
This paper summarizes the motivations and results obtained so far in the frame of a particular non-linearization of Classical Electrodynamics, which was called Extended Electrodynamics. The main purpose pursued with this non-linear…
Several noncovariant formulations of the electromagnetic self-force of extended charged bodies, as have been developed in the context of classical models of charged particles, are compared. The mathematical equivalence of the various…
The microscopic theory of the Casimir effect in the dielectric is studied in the framework when absorption is realized via a reservoir modeled by a set of oscillators with continuously distributed frquencies with the aim to see if the…
In the classical theory of electromagnetism, the permittivity and the permeability of free space are constants whose magnitudes do not seem to possess any deeper physical meaning. By replacing the free space of classical physics with the…
A compact and elegant description of the electromagnetic fields in media and in vacuum is attained in the differential forms formalism. This description is explicitly invariant under diffeomorphisms of the spacetime so it is suitable for…