Title: Everything You Know about Polarization is Wrong
Abstract:
It is almost universally taken for granted that polarization in continuous media is the volume density of the electric dipole moment. A closer inspection shows, however, that this view is problematic. In particular, the notion of “dipole moment per unit volume” does not give rise to a polarization field whose divergence is equal to (the negative of) charge density. Similar considerations apply to magnetization.
These fundamental issues are important not only in their own right, but also due to the emergence of electromagnetic metamaterials – artificial periodic structures judiciously designed to control the propagation of waves and produce peculiar physical behavior.
In this seminar, we shall review the fundamental notions of polarization and magnetization, as well as classical homogenization theories. The material is accessible to undergraduate and graduate students and is also hoped to be of interest to researchers in applied physics, electromagnetics, and optics. More advanced subjects, related to homogenization of metamaterials, will be considered in the second seminar, planned for the last week of June.
Biography:
Igor Tsukerman is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Akron, Ohio, USA, where he has been a faculty member since 1995. His research is focused on the simulation of nanoscale systems, applied electromagnetics and photonics. He teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses (Programming for Engineers, Signals & Systems, Circuits, Electromagnetic Fields, Digital Signal Processing, Random Signal Analysis, Simulation of Nanoscale Systems, and others). Tsukerman has about 180 refereed publications. He has authored the monograph Computational Methods for Nanoscale Applications: Particles, Plasmons and Waves (Springer 2008) and co-edited another book, Plasmonics and Plasmonic Metamaterials (World Scientific 2011). Currently he is acting as Editor-in-Chief of a five-volume reference set on electromagnetic analysis and simulation, to be published by World Scientific in 2018. He is also working on the 2nd edition of Computational Methods for Nanoscale Applications. Before coming to the University of Akron, Tsukerman worked at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the University of Toronto (1990–1995). Tsukerman’s academic degrees are from St. Petersburg Polytechnic in Russia: a combined B.Sc. / M.Sc. degree (with honors) in Control Systems (1982) and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1988).
Contact
Igor Tsukerman
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
The University of Akron, OH 44325-3904, USA
igor@uakron.edu
http://blogs.uakron.edu/tsukerman/