Plane Waves
The plane sinusoidal solution for an electromagnetic wave traveling in the z direction is (cgs units and SI units)
for the electric field and
for the magnetic field, where k is the wavenumber,
is the angular frequency of the wave, and is the speed of light. The hats on the vectors indicate unit vectors in the x, y, and z directions.
The plane wave is parameterized by the amplitudes
and phases
where
- .
and
- .
Read more about this topic: Sinusoidal Plane-wave Solutions Of The Electromagnetic Wave Equation
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