Classical Electrodynamics

by Robert G. Brown Duke University Physics Department Durham, NC 27708-0305 Copyright Robert G. Brown, 2024

Physics 319 Lecture Notes

These lecture notes areprovided for the benefit of my current (fall 2006) Duke Physics Class. Others who discover it online are welcome to use and peruse it and associated resources online for the purpose of teaching or learning physics. All other use must conform to the Open Publication License published on this website.

Note that these notes are derived from J. D. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics, 2nd and 3rd editions. However, they are significantly augmented in certain places, most notably in its discussion of vector spherical harmonics and Hansen functions, which is derived from Larry Biedenharn's notes on the subject, and in its discussion of radiation reaction and both Dirac and Wheeler and Feynman papers regarding the same.

Feel free to contact me with any errors you might discover, suggestions, etc. I'm in the process of converting the notes from the Gaussian units favored in the 2nd edition to the natural units of the current edition of Jackson, so it is entirely possible that there exist discrepancies within the notes of order $4\pi$, or spurious factors of $c$, in addition to garden variety algebraic errors.