Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Electromagnetic field
Summary
An electromagnetic field (also EM field or EMF) is a classical (i.e. non-quantum) field produced by moving electric charges. It is the field described by classical electrodynamics (a classical field theory) and is the classical counterpart to the quantized electromagnetic field tensor in quantum electrodynamics (a quantum field theory). The electromagnetic field propagates at the speed of light (in fact, this field can be identified as light) and interacts with charges and currents. Its quantum counterpart is one of the four fundamental forces of nature (the others are gravitation, weak interaction and strong interaction).
The field can be viewed as the combination of an electric field and a magnetic field. The electric field is produced by stationary charges, and the magnetic field by moving charges (electric currents); these two are often described as the sources of the field. The way in which charges and currents interact with the electromagnetic field is described by Maxwell's equations (which also describes how time-varying field can produce other fields, and explains why electromagnetic radiation doesn't need any medium for propagation) and the Lorentz force law.
From a classical perspective in the history of electromagnetism, the electromagnetic field can be regarded as a smooth, continuous field, propagated in a wavelike manner. By contrast, from the perspective of quantum field theory, this field is seen as quantized; meaning that the free quantum field (i.e. non-interacting field) can be expressed as the Fourier sum of creation and annihilation operators in energy-momentum space while the effects of the interacting quantum field may be analyzed in perturbation theory via the S-matrix with the aid of a whole host of mathematical techniques such as the Dyson series, Wick's theorem, correlation functions, time-evolution operators, Feynman diagrams etc. The quantized field is still spatially continuous, but its energy states are discrete and integer multiples of - quanta of energy called photons, created by the quantum field's creation operators.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.