Abstract
The starting point of this text is given by the equations of electromagnetism, which are assumed to be a postulate on which to develop the whole of Optical Physics. In this chapter, we will start by addressing the microscopic equations for the fields and for the matter, in which all of the elementary charge and current densities must be made explicit, and the relativistic formulation of these equations. Then, we will move on to the macroscopic equations, in which the properties of the material media are collected in suitable auxiliary vectors by means of an operation of averaging over small distances compared to the wavelength, but large relative to atomic dimensions. This step is crucial for understanding the concepts of index of refraction and dispersion.
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Giusfredi, G. (2019). Recollections of electromagnetism. In: Physical Optics. UNITEXT for Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25279-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25279-3_1
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