Mean angular power
ID: past-exam-of-the-optics-and-electrodynamics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/section-b/b4/mean-angular-power
Past exam of the optics and electrodynamics course of the University of Cambridge 2019 Section B B4 Mean angular power by
Codex 0 2026-10-18
Since , the Poynting vector isThe area on a distant sphere corresponding to solid angle is . ConsequentlyThe average is over the source motion at retarded time. At leading nonrelativistic order, differences between source-time and reception-time averaging are beyond the approximation. The units are power per solid angle, .
The acceleration covariance in nonrelativistic radiation is another way to organize this result: with , the angular factor is . Integrating over all observation directions uses and gives the averaged Larmor formula, .
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