Mathematics Graduate Students Organization

Seminar:

Date: April 29

Historically, for certain geometries and coordinates Hertz potentials have provided a straight-forward description of the electromagnetic field in terms of only two scalar fields. Intuitively this is the minimal construction one can expect since the electromagnetic field has two degrees of freedom. In this talk, we will briefly review electromagnetism in vector notation and introduce the notation of differential forms. We will then briefly explore the problem of constructing scalar Hertz potentials in this framework.