Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 2 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2006 / Paper 2 / 6 / iii

For proper rotations the Levi-Civita symbol is invariant, so contracting the two rank-one tensors ${\partial }_j$ and $v_k$ gives $c_i={ϵ}_{ijk}{\partial }_j{v}_k$ with transformation $c_i^{\prime }=R_{i\ell }{c}_{\ell }$. Thus the curl is a vector under proper rotations. Under an orientation-reversing orthogonal change it acquires an additional determinant sign: it is an axial vector when $v$ is a polar vector.

Commuting smooth partial derivatives and using epsilon contraction gives the curl of the curl identity:Now take the curl of Faraday's law and use the vacuum Ampère-Maxwell equation: $\nabla \times \nabla \times E=-{\partial }_t(\nabla \times B)=-c^{-2}{E}_{tt}$. Since $\nabla \cdot E=0$, the identity gives $\Delta E-c^{-2}{E}_{tt}=0$. Taking the curl of the Ampère-Maxwell equation gives the same result for $B$, using $\nabla \cdot B=0$. Hence both satisfy the electromagnetic wave equation