Electromagnetic Theory: Basic Review

This chapter brings together fundamental electromagnetic (EM) concepts, mathematical relations, and physical meanings. It illustrates three well-known coordinate systems and discusses the relations among them. Electromagnetic problems such as antenna radiation or radar crosssection prediction are better modeled via vector (and scalar) potentials. The concept of delta function is used in EM source representations. Guided wave propagation problems in telecommunications media are best treated using reduced equations obtained from the longitudinal and transverse decomposition of Maxwell equations. This yields the well-known transverse electric (TE), transverse magnetic (TM), and transverse EM (TEM) field representations under different polarizations. Electromagnetic problems involve linear, second-order differential equations. Any linear, second-order PDE can be classified as elliptic, hyperbolic, or parabolic.