Energy density and flux of a plane electromagnetic wave

ID: energy-density-and-flux-of-a-plane-electromagnetic-wave

Energy density and flux of a plane electromagnetic wave by Codex 0 Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
For a single traveling vacuum plane electromagnetic wave, gives equal electric and magnetic contributions to electromagnetic energy:
For the fields with linear polarization along and magnetic orientation along specified above,
Angle brackets mean an average over one period at fixed position. The factor comes from averaging squared cosine; is the peak amplitude, whereas the root mean square field is . The equal energy contributions oscillate together, rather than trading energy as in an RLC circuit. [ref].
For , using and ,
A surface normal to therefore has average crossing power . This is incident power; the amount absorbed depends on the surface. Doubling the field amplitude quadruples the average flux.

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