Electric Dipole Radiation Physics 202 Summer 2009 Notes compiled by Alpar Sevgen ussed, In these notes electric dipole radiation is dis I found the following references very useful:(1} and (2)1. Electric Dipole Radiation Accelerating electric charges emit electromagnetic radiation, These radia- tion fields have the following characteristies © Radiation fields Ep, Bp behave as at large ¢ Ep, cBp and # (direction of propagation) form a right-handed triad, and thus Ep,y, ¢ Br,» are transverse fields EB we I4> = Bae Figure 1: Bry, ¢Br,y are transverse fields ¢ Ep and Bp are proportional to the acceleration @ of the charges, © Ep and Bp depend on the reti ded time: , (1) R t=t-— where R=|F- 7=) pl rie Figure 2: The radiation fields Ep, Br observed at (F,t) depend on the re- tarded source time t= — R/e, Eq.(1)- tion is much We now specialize to the case where the wavelength A of the ra larger than the maximum linear dimension D of the source region, that is >> D, and that the motions of charges are nonrelativistic 22 << 1, and observation point is far away r >> A. In that case electric dipole approxi- mation to the radiated field is very good, and we simply quote the result for a dipole p(t) at the origin, 1 Prphys (t= r/e) dren r ERntysl™t) (2) where 1 indicates perpendicular to # In many important cases p(t) has harmonic time dependence Pphysioat = Rept) = Regie" , (3) where ji, may be a complex valued vector. Then we set En,pnysio = Rein (4) and thus we can now use the complex valued fields 1 wi t-r/o) BERL) = 5 BF) = 9) Let us now discuss the electric dipole Ae) = tert Blt—r/c) Poe ltr! = pee where (6)