Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-b-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2018/paper-1/section-b/b8/solution

Effective permittivity. Use peak phasors with time dependence . The Ampere-Maxwell law is
The conductive contribution to complex permittivity is therefore
Here is the source's effective relative permittivity, not just the real part of a complex response. The positive imaginary term is the loss sign appropriate to this time convention.
The penetrating electric wave. Combine this equation with Faraday's law of induction. In a uniform source-free medium the transverse phasor satisfies
For a good conductor of electrical conductivity , , so . The root which decays into is
Choose the surface phasor amplitude real. Taking the real part of gives
The skin depth is an amplitude-decay distance in metres.
The magnetic wave and phase. The curl of an -polarized field varying in is in the direction. Since ,
Thus
The phase sign follows the specified convention. Equivalently the surface impedance of a good conductor is .
How the fields differ from those in vacuum. The two metal fields have the same exponential envelope and spatial period , but their phase arguments differ by .
Figure 1.
Original normalized electric and magnetic field profiles inside a good conductor at one instant, showing their common decay envelope and quarter-of-a-right-angle phase difference
. Details.
An individual travelling wave in the lossless exterior has no attenuation, real wave impedance and in-phase electric and magnetic fields. The exterior total field also includes the reflected wave and may show interference, so it need not share that simple phase relation everywhere. At the interface the tangential fields match; is the field just inside the metal, not necessarily the incident amplitude. A good conductor reflects strongly and its wave impedance is much smaller than the vacuum impedance.
Average inward energy flux. For peak phasors, the Poynting vector averaged over a cycle is . The fields give
Consequently the constant in the question is
The flux is in the direction and has units .
Local energy conservation. The Poynting flux and local heating in a skin layer satisfy
The decrease becomes Joule heating in each layer. The Poynting theorem includes this transfer from field energy to the metal; averaged electromagnetic energy storage has zero time derivative in the periodic state, so no energy is lost from the complete balance.

New to topics? Read the docs here!