1/17/2020 Maxwell’s Equations and the Helmholtz Wave Equation

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 Benjamin Klein  Laser Photonics  Maxwell’s Equations and the Helmholtz Wave Equation

MAXWELL’S EQUATIO NS AND THE

HELMHO LTZ WAVE EQUATIO N
There are four Maxwell equations, which you can nd in many places.  I’ll repeat them here, but I
want to give you some feeling for what the equations mean.  After all, we’re not mathematicians,
interested in equations for their own sake.  We’re interested in what equations tell us about the
physical world.

The rst Maxwell equation is called Ampere’s Law:

where H is the magnetic eld, J is the electrical current density, and D is the electric ux density,
which is related to the electric eld.   In words, this equation says that the curl of the magnetic
eld equals the electrical current density plus the time derivative of the electric ux density.
 Physically, this means that two things create magnetic elds curling around them: electrical
current, and time-varying (not static) electric elds.  The typical example of this is a vertical
current-bearing wire with magnetic eld lines looping around it:

(insert picture)

The second Maxwell equation is called Faraday’s Law:

where E is the electric eld and B is the magnetic ux density, which is related to the magnetic
eld.  This is called Faraday’s Law, and similar to Ampere’s Law, it tells us that time-varying
magnetic elds create electric elds curling around them.
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What does ‘related’ mean, anyways?  Well, it turns out that

and

which don’t really count as Maxwell equations – they’re called ‘constitutive relations’ – but
they’re still very important.   is the permittivity, and is the permeability, both of which are
properties of whatever material you’re in (air, glass, water, plastic, metal, etc.)

If we consider Ampere’s law and Faraday’s law (only two Maxwell equations – there are two
more, we’ll get to them in a second!) we see that time-varying electric elds create magnetic
elds curling around them, and time-varying magnetic elds create electric elds curling around
them.  This is why electromagnetic waves can exist, and can carry energy far away from their
source (billions of light-years, in the case of distant galaxies):  the electric and magnetic elds
can support one another.

The third Maxwell equation is Gauss’ Law:

where is the electric charge density.  This equation tells us that charge creates electric elds
diverging from it.  Think of that charged metal sphere you grabbed as a kid to make your hair
stand up.  The electric eld lines were radiating outward from it.

And nally, the fourth Maxwell equation, which is nameless:

which tells us that magnetic elds don’t diverge from anything, they only curl around.  Or
equivalently: there is no such thing as magnetic charge, at least not that we’ve found so far.

Since we’re mostly interested in electromagnetic waves here, and in particular light waves, we
have to convert the Maxwell equations into a form that easily yields wave-like solutions.  To
accomplish this, we will derive the Helmholtz wave equation from the Maxwell equations.

We’ve discussed how the two ‘curl’ equations (Faraday’s and Ampere’s Laws) are the key to
electromagnetic waves.  They’re tricky to solve because there are so many different elds in
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them: E, D, B, H, and J, and they’re all interdependent.  So our goal will be to combine those two
equations into a single equation with a single eld in it.

First, let’s assume we’re in a uniform material, so that the permittivity epsilon and the
permeability mu are constants – they don’t change in space or in time.  Of course, that can’t be
true for the entire universe, but it can be approximately true in some limited-size region, which is
where we’ll solve Maxwell’s equations for now.  We’ll also pick a region that has zero
conductivity, and therefore zero electrical current density J.  That gets rid of one of our elds
right away.  Of course our solution won’t be entirely general, because it won’t necessarily apply
to regions with nonzero conductivity, but we can x that up later.

Our next goal will be to somehow get rid of the magnetic eld on the right hand side of
Faraday’s law, and replace it with an expression involving the electric eld.  That way we’d have
an equation with only one eld – E – on both sides of the equation.  How can we accomplish
this?  Well, we know that Ampere’s law relates the curl of the magnetic eld to the electric eld,
so we’re going to take the curl of both sides of Faraday’s law:

I’ve brought the curl inside the time derivative, but that’s ok – it’s just interchanging the order of
differentiation.  We’ve certainly made Faraday’s law look messier, how does it help us?  Well, let’s
rewrite Ampere’s law using our constitutive relations, and getting rid of J:

or

OK, so now I have an expression that allows me to replace the curl of B with an expression
involving E.  Let’s swap that into our modi ed Faraday’s law:

Mission accomplished!  We’ve condensed the two Maxwell curl equations down into a single
equation involving nothing but E.  This is one form of the Helmholtz wave equation, although

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not necessarily the nicest form to solve, since it has the curl of a curl on the left hand side.  We
can use some vector identities to simplify that a bit.  One useful vector identity is the following:

where is any vector eld.  One tedious but reliable way of deriving this relatively wacky-
looking vector identity is to write out all of the vector components and derivatives; in the time-
honored words of many distinguished textbook writers, ‘we leave this as an exercise for the
reader’.

The vector identity doesn’t really seem to simplify things much – it just allows us to replace the
curl of the curl with a different complicated-looking expression – but we can improve things by
putting one more restriction on the region where we’re solving these equations; namely, that
there is no ‘free’ (unbound) electrical charge in that region, or .  In that case, Gauss’ Law
becomes

where we’ve assumed that doesn’t depend on position, allowing us to take it outside of the
derivative.  Dividing both sides by nally gives us

You’d be excused for wondering what the point is of all this.  We’re getting to it!  Let’s go back to
our vector identity and replace generic eld with electric eld :

You see that in there?  Now we know it’s zero, as long as we’re in a region with no charge,
and as long as the permittivity is constant with position.  So now we have a pretty nice
simpli cation; namely

I’m going to put that back into the Helmholtz equation, to give me.. uh, still the Helmholtz
equation:

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usually we gather everything on one side:

Whew!  And that is the Helmholtz wave equation.

Units:

Solution of Helmholtz equation on separate page

SUMMARY OF MAXWELL’S
EQUATIONS

RESOURCES 

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