Course syllabus

Course-PM

RRY036 RRY036 Electromagnetic waves and components lp1 HT25 (7.5 hp)

Course is offered by the department of Space, Earth and Environment

Contact details

Examiner: Pär Strand

Teachers:

• Pär Strand (par.strand@chalmers.se), phone 772 1514, room 4433 (EDIT building)
• Arto Heikkilä (arto.heikkila@chalmers.se), room 4320 (EDIT building)
• Alejandro Guillevic (alejandro.guillevic@chalmers.se), room 4411 (EDIT building)

• Vincent Desmaris Vincent.desmaris@chalmers.se Room A617(MC2 building) – Lab coordination, Lab 1 and  2

• Joachim Ciers (joachim.ciers@chalmers.se), room B437(MC2) Hologram assignment, Lab 3

Administrator: Jasmine Nilsson (Jasmine.Nilsson@chalmers.se)

Course purpose

The aim of the course is to enhance the student's insight into the physical concepts and principles used to describe the generation and detection of electromagnetic waves, and their propagation through different types of media. The manipulation of electromagnetic waves in modern wireless and photonics components is highlighted. This course provides a basis for further studies in engineering branches, which rely heavily on the usage of electromagnetic waves (e.g. microwave engineering, photonics, electronic  communication, and remote sensing).

The teacher lead activities comprise lectures where the central parts of the theory are discussed and problem-solving sessions where example problems are solved. There will be compulsory lab exercises and a compulsory home assignment with written and experimental examination. In addition, optional homework problems will be distributed during the course. The theory part and laboratory work comprise 6.0 and 1.5 credits, respectively. 

Schedule

TimeEdit

 

Course literature

The main material of the course is taken from chapters 1-3, 5-7, 11 and 15 in Orfanidis’ online book. In addition, a few chapters from other sources and lecture notes will be used. All of the course material can be accessed freely from the web or the course homepage.

Book: Sophocles J. Orfanidis: Electromagnetic Waves and Antennas (Link to course book at Rutgers.edu))

Handouts

Texts from E-books available in the library (a separate list will be handed out)

Suggestions for further reading

Other helpful recommended texts are

1. P. Feynman, Feynman's lecture notes on Physics, Vol I-III, Addison Wesley Longman (June 1970). Anyone interested in learning physics in a deep way should seriously consider investing in their own copy of Feynman.
2. David J. Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics, 3^rd ed, Prentice Hall (1999).
3. H. Staelin, A. W. Morgenthaler, J. A. Kong, Electromagnetic waves, Prentice Hall (1998).
4. Fleisch, A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equations, Cambridge University Press (2008).
5. M. Schey, “Div, grad, curl and all that”, W W Norton & Company (2005).
6. Fox, Quantum Optics, Oxford University press (2006).

Course design

The lectures are held mainly in Chalmers EDIT building (Linsen EL41). Course activities are mainly within the following timings:

Tuesday 13.15-17:00

Thursday 13.15-17:00

Friday 13:15-15:00

where the practice sessions are generally held Tuesdays 15:15-17:00 and where the teacher assisted self-study sessions are on Thursdays 15:15-17:00. Note that the exact distribution between lectures and demonstrations can change due to availability of teachers and other scheduling issues.

Special sessions (compulsory):

• Presentation of hologram homework assignment. Thursday September 4, 15:15-17:00 in EL41 (Joachim Ciers)
• Presentation of laboratory work. Friday September 12, 13:15-15:00 in EL41 (Vincent Desmaris)

Note that the Laboratory work is performed week 3-5 and has its own schedule outside of the blocks above.

Week plans (preliminary)

Week 1: Maxwell’s equations (Pär Strand, Joachim Ciers)

[Texts: Lecture notes, ch. 1.1-1.9 in Orfanidis]

• Course introduction. Brief review of electromagnetics.
• Maxwell’s equations.
• Mathematical background.
• Constitutive relations, conservation laws.
• Presentation of hologram homework assignment.

Week 2: Uniform plane waves

[Texts: Lecture notes, ch. 2.1-2.10, 11.6-11.7 in Orfanidis] (Pär Strand, Vincent Desmaris)

Hologram homework assignment due Friday.

• Uniform plane waves in lossless media. Monochromatic waves.
• Energy density and flux. Wave impedance, polarization.
• Plane waves in lossy media: weakly lossy dielectrics, good conductors.
• Inhomogeneous (or Complex) waves.
• Waves on a transmission line.
• Presentation of laboratory work

Week 3: Plane waves, continued. Pulse propagation in dispersive media.(Pär Strand)

[Texts: Lecture notes, ch. 1.10-1.18, 3.5-3.6, 3.9 in Orfanidis]

Labs 1&2 start.

• Plane waves in lossy media: weakly lossy dielectrics, good conductors.
• Inhomogeneous (or Complex) waves. Waves on a transmission lines.
• Simple models of dielectrics, conductors, and plasmas.
• Kramers-Kronig relations. Group velocity, energy velocity. Group velocity dispersion and pulse spreading. Slow, fast, and negative group velocities.

Week 4: Physics of two-level systems. Reflection and transmission. (Arto Heikillä)

[Texts: Lecture notes, ch. 5.1, 5.5, 6.1-6.3, 7.1, 7.4-7.8 in Orfanidis]

 

• Excitation and de-excitation of a two-level system (radiative and collisional processes). Black body radiation.
• Reflection/transmission at normal incidence. Propagation matrices, matching matrices. Antireflective coatings. Multilayer structures, dielectric mirrors. Oblique incidence and Snel’s law. Fresnel reflection coefficients. Maximum angle and critical angle. Brewster angle. Total internal reflection.

Week 5: Reflection and transmission, continued. Inhomogeneous media. Physics of two level systems. (Pär Strand, Arto Heikkilä)

[Texts: Lecture notes, ch. 7.13, 7.15 in Orfanidis]

Lab 3 starts.

• Geometrical optics. Ray tracing. Propagation in inhomogeneous media. Paraxial approximation.
• Rabi oscillations. Radiative transfer in a medium with two-level systems. Mechanism for amplification.

Week 6: Radiation and scattering. Physics of two-level systems, continued. (Pär Strand, Arto Heikillä)

[Texts: Lecture notes, ch. 15.1-15.3, 15.5-15.10 in Orfanidis]

• Currents and charges as sources of fields. Gauge transformations. Retarded potentials.
• What is radiation? Fields of electric and magnetic dipoles. Radiation fields. What is scattering? Thompson and Rayleigh scattering.
• Rabi oscillations. Radiative transfer in a medium with two-level systems. Mechanism for amplification.

Week 7. Radiation and Scattering (Pär Strand)

[Texts: Lecture notes, ch. 15.1-15.3, 15.5-15.10 in Orfanidis]

Lab report due week 7 Monday

• What is radiation? Fields of electric and magnetic dipoles. Radiation fields. What is scattering? Thompson and Rayleigh scattering.

Week 8: Summary and practice exam

Exercises and homework problems

A separate list of recommended exercises from Orfanidis’ book will be distributed during the course  Some of the exercises will be distributed as optional homework problems.

Home assignment with written & experimental examination: ”Design and fabricate your own hologram”

The course contains a compulsory home assignment that will be examined both as a hand-in through the online system by Thursday week 3, showing the result of the numerical design of a hologram, and as an experiment conducted during one of the lab exercises, showing how it works in practice. Before the home assignment, there will be a special lecture that gives the course participants the necessary background.

Laboratory exercises with written & experimental examination

The laboratory exercises are performed in groups of 2 students. Invitations to lab time slots will be sent through Canvas.

There will be a lecture introducing the components and measurement techniques required in the labs so that all students can come well prepared . Separate lab-pm documents will be available in the online system for downloading during the course. Please note that some homework questions, found in the lab-pm, should be answered before coming to the lab.

There will be three separate 2-hour lab sessions, where all but the first consist of two consecutive one-hour lab exercises. In total, each student will do 5 different lab exercises, on the following topics:

• Lab 1 Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) using a Vector Network Analyzer
• Lab 2a Microwave TDR
• Lab 2b Optical TDR (OTDR)
• Lab 3a Test Your Own Hologram
• Lab 3b 3D Projection

Lab 1 and 2 will be run in the SEE_GARDeroben room, located at the 6^th floor of the A-part of the MC2 building at kemivägen 9.

Each student will individually be assigned one of the 5 different lab exercises to hand in a formal lab report on. The information on which of the labs you will be expected to report on will be published on Wed. of Study Week 6, after all the lab exercises have been performed by all the students, so you will need to take careful notes at all labs in case that particular lab is chosen for you to submit a report on. Even though the labs are done in pairs, each student must individually hand in a lab report, written in their own words, taking care to follow recommendations for academic honesty (e.g. references to sources of information and careful attention not to plagiarize). All lab reports will be checked for plagiarism through the Ouriginal system.

The lab report is to be submitted through Canvas by Mon. of Study Week 7.

Changes made since the last occasion

• None

Learning objectives and syllabus

Learning objectives:

• Apply Maxwell's equations to analyse and solve wave propagation problems with simple boundary conditions and interpret the results.
• Analyse the propagation of plane and paraxial electromagnetic waves through homogeneous and inhomogeneous lossy media, how the wave reflects/refracts at dielectric and conducting boundaries, and evaluate how the wave is affected by dispersion and scattering.
• Describe the mechanism for propagation and reflection of voltage waves along transmission lines.
• Explain what is meant by: characteristic impedance, wave impedance, complex index of refraction, Poynting vector, phase velocity, group velocity, dispersion, and scattering.
• Perform calculations of blackbody radiation, and emission of waves by electric dipoles.
• Perform calculations of scattering of waves (e.g. Rayleigh and Thompson).
• Perform calculations on the excitation of, and radiative transfer in, a medium with two-level system.
• Describe physical mechanisms for emission and absorption of electromagnetic waves, and methods to create and detect them.
• Use computer tools to visualize electromagnetic field phenomena and design a hologram.
• Describe the working principles of basic photonic and microwave components, which are based on wave phenomena.
• Perform experimental work in the photonics and microwave areas.
• Present clearly documentation of computer based work and summarize the experimental work in written form in English.
• Perform scientific writing in an ethically justifiable manner, eg related to plagiarism and authorship.

Link to the syllabus on Studieportalen.

Study plan

 

Examination form

The examination on the theory part is in the form of a written exam (2025-10-27 am, the first resit exam is scheduled for 2026-01-07 pm). On the exam you may use: Chalmers-approved calculator, enclosed formula sheets, dictionary (not electronic). To pass the course (grade 3), 40% of the maximum points is required. Grade 4 requires 60% and grade 5 requires 80%, of the maximum points. The laboratory part is examined separately (see below).