Introduction
My research mostly deal with the response of materials when electromagnetic waves sent to the materials. My work usually use microwave and millimeter wave spectral range.
In this post, I want to explain the response of materials in electromagnetic fields, particularly the propagation of electromagnetic waves in the materials.
Maxwell’s Equations in The Presence of Matter
The equations are:
The presence of a medium in electromagnetic fields may lead to electric dipoles and magnetic moments, polarization charges, and induced current. Clearly the electromagnetic fields will not be uniform within the material but fluctuate from point to point reflecting the periodicity of the atomic lattice. For wavelengths appreciably larger than the atomic spacing, nevertheless we can consider an average value of the electric and magnetic fields. These fields, however, are different compared with the fields in vacuum; consequently and
are introduced to account for the modifications by the medium.
The total charge density has two components
an external charge added from outside and a contribution due to the spatially varying polarization
In a homogeneous neutral material (not in electromagnetic fields) the positive and negative charges cancel everywhere inside the material, leading to no net charge .
Let’s assume there is no external current present: . The total current density
consists of a a contribution
arising from the motion of electrons in the presence of an electric field and of a contribution
arising from the redistribution of bound charges:
Ohm’s law is assumed to apply to this conduction current
is the conductivity of the material.
The electric field strength and the electric displacement
are connected by the dielectric constant (or permittivity)
:
where is the dielectric susceptibility and
is the dipole moment density or polarization density. The dielectric constant
can be either positive or negative. Similarly, the magnetic field strength
is connected to the magnetic induction
by the permeability
:
where is the magnetic susceptibility and
is the magnetic moment density, or magnetization. The quantities
, and
which connect the fields are unitless. The magnetic susceptibility
is typically four to five orders of magnitude smaller (except in the case of ferromagnetism) than the dielectric susceptibility
, which is the order of unity. For this reason the dia- and para-magnetic properties can in general be neglected compared to the dielectric properties when electromagnetic waves pass through a medium. Frequently, we do not discuss the properties of magnetic materials and therefore we assume that
.
Using Eq. (9) and Ohm’s law (8) and recalling that there is no external current, Eq. (3) can be written as
where we have assumed a harmonic time dependence of the displacement term , and we have defined the complex dielectric quantity
By writing , the change in magnitude and the phase shift between displacement
and the electric field
are conveniently expressed.
and
span a phase angle of
. Here
is the in-phase and
is the out-of-phase component. The notation accounts for the general fact that the response of the medium can have a time delay with respect to the applied perturbation. Similarly the conductivity can be assumed to be complex
to include the phase shift of the conduction and the bound current, leading to more general Ohm’s law
and we define the relation between the complex conductivity and the complex dielectric constant as
Besides the interchange of real and imaginary parts in the conductivity and dielectric constant, the division by becomes important in the limits
and
to avoid diverging functions.
Wave equations in the medium
To find a solution of Maxwell’s equations we consider an infinite medium to avoid boundary and edge effects. Furthermore we assume the absence of free charges () and external currents (
). We use a sinusoidal periodic time and spatial dependence for the electric and magnetic waaves. Thus,
and
describe the electric and magnetic fields with wavevector and frequency
. We have included a phase factor
to indicate that electric and magnetic fields may be shifted in phase with respect to each other. The wavevector
has to be a complex quantity: to describe the spatial dependence of the wave it has to include a propagation as well as attenuation part. Using the vector identity:
with Maxwell’s eqs (1) and (4), we can separate the magnetic and electric components to obtain
By substituting the three material eqs (8)-(10) into Ampere’s Law (3), we arrive at . Combining this with Eq. (20) eventually leads to the wave equation for the electric field
if is assumed. In Eq. (21) the second term represents Maxwell’s displacement current; the last term is due to the conduction current. Similarly we obtain the equation
describing the propagation of the magnetic field. From Eq. (2) we can immediately conclude that always has only transverse components. The electric field may have longitudinal certain cases, for from Eq. (4) we find
only in the absence of a net charge density.
If Faraday’s Law is expressed in space using Fourier transformation:
we immediately see that for a plane wave both the electric field and the direction of the propagation vector
are perpendicular to the magnetic field
, which can be written as
is not necessarily perpendicular to
. Without expliciyly solving the wave equations (21) and (22), we already see from eq. (24) that if matter present with finite dissipation
– where the wavevector is complex – there is a phase shift between the electric and magnetic field. Substituting Eq. (17) into (21), we obtain the following dispersion relation between the wavevector
and the frequency
:
where is the unit vector along the
direction. Note that we have made the assumption that no net charge
is present: i.e.
. A complex wavevector
is a compact way of expressing the fact that a wave propagating in the
direction expriences a change in wavelength and an attenuation in the medium compared to when it is in free space. The propagation of the electric and magnetic field (Eqs (21 and (22)) can now be written in Hemholtz’s compact form of the wave equation:
It should be pointed out that the propagation of the electric and magnetic fields is described by the same wavevector , however there may be a phase shift with respect to each other (
).
In the case of a medium with neglible electric loses (), Eqs (21) and (22) are reduced to:
There are no variations of the magnitude of and
inside the material, however the velocity of propagation has changed by
compared to when it is in a vacuum. we immediately see from Eq.(25) that the wavevector
is real for non-conducting materials. Eq. (24) and the corresponding equation for the electric field then become
indicating that both quantities are zero at the same time and at the same location and thus . The solutions of Eqs (27) are restricted to transferse wave. In the case
, both E and H are perpendicular to the direction of propagation
, hence these waves called transverse electric and magnetic (TEM) waves.