General

The teaching is given mainly in form of lectures. Four workshops are arranged for discussion and feedback on the exercises. Weekly electronic quizzes give feedback on the understanding of basic concepts. Two handins are graded to give feedback on the students' written work. One final project finishes the course.

Examination

To complete the course with the grade 3, the student must complete the two handins, a written report for the project, and an oral presentation. For a higher grade (4 or 5), the student must also pass an oral exam.

Lectures

The default literature is Orfanidis. Two extra chapters from other sources are used, indicated by "BRI" for Bondeson, Rylander, and Ingelström, and "Sj" for Sjöberg, see the link "Course material" to the left. Also, the topic of beams is covered only in lecture notes.

Frequent use is made of demonstration programs. If you want to run these for yourself, you need to install python (free software), and some additional packages, see instructions below.

A particularly extensive demonstration program EMANIM has been written by Andras Szilagy. It is available with source code in python or as a compiled .exe program for windows. With this program you can visualize the propagation and polarization of electromagnetic waves in isotropic, anisotropic, and optically active media.

	Date	Topic	Material
1	31/8	Introduction, Maxwell's equations, boundary conditions, conservation laws	Ch 1.1-1.8, slides
2	2/9	Material modeling, constitutive relations	Ch 1.9-1.18, slides, demo
3	3/9	Workshop
4	7/9	Phenomenology of wave propagation	Ch 2.1-2.5, Sec. 1&2 in Sj, slides, propconst.m
5	9/9	Propagation in lossy media, complex waves, beams	Ch 2.6-2.12, slides, demo1, demo2
6	10/9	Workshop
7	14/9	Finite differences in the time domain (FDTD)	BRI 5.1-5.2, slides, demo
8	16/9	Scattering problems with FDTD, pulse propagation	BRI 5.3, Ch 3.1-3.4, slides, demo
9	17/9	Pulse propagation in dispersive media	Ch 3.5-3.11, slides, demo
10	21/9	Propagation in birefringent media	Ch 4, slides
11	23/9	Reflection and transmission	Ch 5, slides, demo1, demo2
12	24/9	Workshop & demonstration lab
13	28/9	Multilayered structures 1	Ch 6.1-6.5, slides, demo
14	30/9	Multilayered structures 2	Ch 6.6-6.8, slides
15	1/10	Workshop
16	5/10	Oblique incidence 1	Ch 7.1-7.10, slides, demo
17	7/10	Oblique incidence 2	Ch 7.11-7.16, slides, demo
18	8/10	Multilayer film applications 1	Ch 8.1-8.6, slides, demo1, demo2, demo3
19	12/10	Multilayer film applications 2	Ch 8.7-8.13, slides, demo
20	14/10	Reserve time
21	15/10	Project presentations.

Exercises

Below are some selected exercises from Orfanidis we will discuss in the workshops. Several of these are computer experiments where you use his matlab codes to investigate the behavior of electromagnetic waves in various circumstances.

1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.11a-d, 2.3, 2.11, 2.19, 2.23, 2.29, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.13, 3.15, 4.5, 4.8, 4.11, 4.13, 5.1, 5.5, 5.7, 5.11, 6.1, 6.11, 6.17, 6.18, 7.8, 7.10, 7.12, 8.3, 8.7, 8.10.

Note that there is a solutions manual for the first two chapters on Orfanidis' web site.

Electronic quizzes

Simple, concept-oriented questions are given every week on the web site moodle.eit.lth.se. You log in using your STIL or lucat identity. Contact Daniel if you experience difficulties.

Handins

Two handins will be distributed, one at the end of week 1 and one at the end of week 3. They should be completed within a week.

• Handin 1 (link removed in 2011)
• Handin 2, starting code (link removed in 2011)

Project

The main examination of the course is through a project, where you analyze an advanced wave propagation problem with modern methods taught in the course. The project proposals can be downloaded here.

• Project proposals (link removed in 2011)

The project presentations are on Friday October 15, 8-10, in E:2349.

Your presentation should be around 10 minutes, followed by around 5 minutes of questions. You will be given feedback forms, in which you can give your fellow students constructive comments on their presentation. Create a presentation in pdf-format using LaTeX, OpenOffice, or Powerpoint. A LaTeX template using beamer can be downloaded here, and a PowerPoint template (which works also in OpenOffice) can be downloaded from the Lund University web site here. 

Some points to consider for your presentation:

• State the problem clearly, the others who are listening have not seen much of it. Give some examples of applications.
• Explain your method of solution, important approximations. Do not rely too much on equations, use words and figures as well.
• Present and discuss your results. Make suitable graphs, and explain clearly what is plotted.
• About 8 slides in total should be enough.

Remember to use large enough fonts so that people in the audience have a fair chance of seeing. This applies also to the graphs.

Python

Some of the demo programs used in the course, particularly those using a GUI, are written in python. If you want to try this (open source, nice and free alternative to matlab), some tips are gathered below. Please note there is absolutely no requirement to learn about python for the course, the information is simply provided to give a few hints to those who want to try it.

If you are using linux (for instance ubuntu or debian), please use the package manager provided by the system (like synaptic under ubuntu). This will make your life considerably simpler, you just have to mark the different packages below and the system will do the installation for you.

If you are using windows, you can get all packages in one bundle by installing Python(x,y), choose Full installation after download.

If you are using macOSX, a corresponding bundle is provided by Enthought (also available for other platforms). I have not tested it myself, but it is recommended by many others. You should probably try the Academic or Trial version (the others cost money).

The packages can also be downloaded from their respective web sites (where you may find additional documentation):

• python (the language itself; use the latest v2.x (like 2.6 or 2.7), several of the packages below like numpy have not been properly ported to python3 yet)
• matplotlib (provides most of the "matlab look-a-like" facilities (some tips here), usually pulls with it numpy and scipy below automagically)
• numpy (basic numerical calculations, particularly matrices)
• scipy (scientific libraries, for instance special functions and signal processing)
• wxpython (for GUI-programming, slightly more advanced, also look at tkinter which is bundled with python from scratch)
• mayavi (for 3D-plots using VTK, advanced but powerful)