Plane Wave Reflection and Refraction in tern of wave equation (ie: intrinsic impedance, reflection & transmission coefficients) - NOT Snells's law.

Monty Hall · science forum beginner Joined: 18 Jul 2005 Posts: 20

Hello,

I was just flipping though my old EM book and have noticed that all examples
of EM plane wave reflection was for normal incidence - boundary conditions
trivial. I was wondering how to compute reflected and refracted waves if
the incidence angle isn't normal.

The closest thing that I saw was Hugyen's principle - plane wave incident @
arbitrary angle - but the reflected and refracted waves are
spherical/cyclindrical and that apparent resultant plane waves of the
reflected and incident waves are a super posistion of all spherical waves.
All I could find are Java applets, any good web resources that step though
the derviation to yield the reflect/refract plane waves?

I'm not interested in Snell's law as I presume that the superposition of an
infinite # of spherical waves ultimately can reduce to Snell's law & law of
reflection. I was kind of thinking that a simple boundary condition would
yield the reflected & refracted wave w/o having to sum an infinite number of
spherical waves or resorting to spherical waves at all.

Regards,

Monty

Timo Nieminen · science forum Guru Wannabe Joined: 12 May 2005 Posts: 244

On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, Monty Hall wrote:

Google