Electromagnetic Analysis of Moving Ideal or Matched Plane Wave Source with the FDTD Method

By using the Finite Difference Time Domain method, this work proposes an original analysis concerning electromagnetism with moving bodies. An ideal plane wave source is modeled with a plane of current sources, whereas a matched plane wave source is modeled with current sources and resistors matched to free space. Numerical full-wave simulations show that energy is not conserved for a moving ideal plane wave source, whereas it is conserved for a moving matched plane wave source. The energy is defined as the integration of the square of the amplitude of the electric field over the frequency spectrum. We show why the ideal source is not realistic and we describe the consequences of our analysis. We believe that the reported results are novel and important in the theory of electromagnetism.