From Electrostatics to Optics

This is a concise and modern course on classical electrodynamics and optics. After a historical introduction and mathematical preliminaries the book begins with electrostatics in vacuum. Maxwell's equations in vacuum are not postulated as axioms, but are deduced from electrostatics plus Lorentz invariance. In chapter 3 the general ideas are illustrated by many applications, in particular, radiation phenomena are treated in detail. Chapter 4 is devoted to the completely different subject of phenomenological electrodynamics of matter. The phenomenological equations are derived by spatial averaging, assuming a classical model for the atomic structure of matter. Optics is not an independent field, but rather an application of Chapter 4. Significant themes such as wave optics, light scattering, geometrical optics, diffraction theory , and the laser are discussed. An epilogue relates the classical theory to modern quantum electrodynamics. The book addresses students of theoretical physics.