On the Centennial of Sommerfeld's Solution to the Problem of Dipole Radiation Over an Imperfectly Conducting Half Space

Some years ago, the authors of this Historical Corner paper edited a special issue of Electromagnetics, intended to commemorate the work of Sommerfeld on his half-plane diffraction paper [1, 2] published in 1896 (Figure 1). This time, there is a second important Sommerfeld centennial to celebrate. This Historical Corner paper is intended to commemorate the work of Sommerfeld on the radiation of a dipole over an imperfectly conducting half space, published in 1909 [4] (Figure 2). This problem remains among the classic problems that can be used for validation of integral-equation codes.