296 Pages
by
Chapman & Hall
Bivectors occur naturally in the description of elliptically polarized homogeneous and inhomogeneous plane waves. The description of a homogeneous plane wave generally involves a vector (the unit vector along the propagation direction) and a bivbector (the complex amplitude of the wave). Inhomogeneous plane waves are described in terms of two bivectors - the complex amplitude and the complex... Read more
Preface 1 The ellipse 2 Bivectors 3 Complex symmetric matrices 4 Complex orthogonal matrices and complex skew-symmetric matrices 5 Ellipsoids 6 Homogeneous and inhomogeneous plane waves 7 Description of elliptical polarization 8 Energy flux 9 Electromagnetic plane waves 10 Plane waves in linearized elasticity theory 11 Plane waves in viscous fluids
Biography
Ph. Boulanger, Department de Mathematique, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. M.A. Hayes, Mathematical Physics Department, University College Dublin, Ireland.
