OPTI 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Electric Field

• School: University of Arizona
• Department: Optical Sciences
• Course: OPTI 200
• Professor: ALL

Document Summary

Light also carried momentum, but too small for us to perceive directly. A wave is a propagating disturbance of some equilibrium, generally a continuous medium. Light waves happen in the em field. An electric field is the space around a charge which awaits to be pulled by its opposite or repelled by its identical charger. Electric field lines point in the direction of the pull or the push that a positive charge would feel at each point in space. No wave is propagated in the direction along which the charge wiggles, and the strongest waves ate propagated in directions that propagated perpendicular to the wiggle. Each charge has field lines attached to it, the lines with a positive charge point away wheres those with a negative charge point toward the charge. If two lines with opposite direction meet, they cancel one another. Em waves generally look like propagating loops of field lines.