TABLE OF CONTENTS This Chapter provides both an overview of classical concepts in electromagnetic theory and a reference with respect to some concepts frequently used throughout the following Chapters.
Large-scale electromagnetic phenomena are governed by equations linking electromagnetic field quantities introduced by James Clerk Maxwell in 1873. These equations were supported by a vast wealth of experimental evidence and by previous observations such as Coulomb's law of force between charges, Ampere's law on the interaction of current elements, the observations of Faraday on variable fields, etc. Moreover, Maxwell's equations were experimentally verified by Heinrich Hertz in 1888 and in 1905 Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity further asserted their rigorousness. A pleasant historical survey on the origin of these equations is provided in [9].
We assume the reader to be already familiar with Maxwell's equations as introduced by preliminary courses and we shall credit him with a general knowledge of the experimental facts and their theoretical interpretation.
It is customary to write Maxwell's equations in either differential form or in integral form. We shall first introduce the differential form; later we discuss briefly the constitutive relationship and then we introduce the integral form of Maxwell's equations.
In three-dimensional vector notation, Maxwell's equations are
| (2.1) |  |
| (2.2) |  |
| (2.3) |  |
| (2.4) |  |
where the various vectors are defined as:
| E( r, t) | electric field strength |
| D( r, t) | electric displacement |
| B( r, t) | magnetic flux density |
| H( |
