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Plane Wave
(redirected from Plane waves)

   Also found in: Wikipedia 0.01 sec.
plane wave [′plān ‚wāv]
(physics)
Wave in which the wavefront is a plane surface; a wave whose equiphase surfaces form a family of parallel planes.

Plane Wave 

a wave in which at every moment the displacements and velocities of the particles in a medium (for mechanical waves) or the strengths of the electric and magnetic fields (for electromagnetic waves) are the same at all points lying in any plane perpendicular to the direction of the wave’s propagation.

Strictly speaking, real plane waves do not exist, since a plane wave that propagates along the x-axis must span the entire region of space with y- and z-coordinates from — ∞ to + ∞. In many cases, however, a bounded (with respect to the y- and z-axes) portion of a wave can be found wherein the wave is nearly the same as a plane wave. This is primarily possible in free space at such great distances from the source that the source can be regarded as a point. Sometimes a wave that is propagating in a bounded region may coincide approximately with such a portion of a plane wave. An example is an elastic wave propagating in a rod.

REFERENCE

Gorelik, G. S. Kolebaniia i volny, 2nd ed., ch. 5, subsec. 2, ch. 7, subsec. 3. Moscow, 1959.


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It is assumed that the reader has already gone through a basic course on electromagnetics and is familiar with Maxwell's equations, plane waves, reflection and refraction phenomena, and waveguides.
1 were numerically studied according to the plane waves superposition approach [5] for the divergent angular distribution of plane waves entering the Slit 1.
Following introductions to fundamental units and prefixes, electrical sources and fundamental quantities, sinusoidal waves, and complex numbers, his 11 chapters cover vectors and fields, basic laws of electromagnetics, uniform plane waves, transmission lines, modified Maxwell's equations and potential functions, source in infinite space, electrostatic fields, magnetostatic fields, waveguides and cavity resonators, and numerical techniques.
 
 
 
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