## anonymous 3 years ago how do electric field lines look on a spherical wave front created by a point source of light?

1. anonymous

Can you phrase that a bit better please.

2. anonymous

|dw:1361889363650:dw| this is for a ray

3. anonymous

i.e. plane wave front can do the same for sperical wavefront

4. anonymous

I'm thinking huygens principle

5. anonymous

|dw:1361889464131:dw|

6. anonymous

polarizing light?

7. anonymous

I haven't learnt about electric field lines produced by photons

8. anonymous

light is an electromagnetic wave, right?

9. anonymous

so i want to know what do electric field vectors look like for a spherical wave front

10. anonymous

ah okay, so the point source can be treated as the center of the sphere, and light is propagating in all directions away from this point? you want to know the electric field vectors it produces?

11. anonymous

|dw:1361889809337:dw|

12. anonymous

yes

13. anonymous

max wells equations will sort you out

14. anonymous
15. anonymous

Maxwell's*

16. anonymous

how do i use them to solve this problem? can you solve this problem please

17. anonymous

|dw:1361890486162:dw|

18. anonymous

intensity at surface of the sphere $I = \frac{ S }{ 4\pi r^2 }$ Each square follows the law so intensity will change at each one like, I ...I/4....I/9

19. anonymous

Same applied for electric field E, as $E = \frac{ Q }{ 4 \pi \epsilon_0 r^2 }$

20. anonymous

Where source strength would be $= \frac{ Q }{ \epsilon_0 }$

21. anonymous

If you want vectors, and the nature of light, you want to be looking into maxwells equations, and to understand them, grasp the concepts of vector calculus, curl, divergence, grad, laplacian

22. anonymous

ok, but how do the electric field vectors look like on a wavefront at particular time?|dw:1361890945224:dw|

23. UnkleRhaukus

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