Lecturer: Jiri Vala (jiri.vala@mu.ie) Tutor: Joe Mc Caffrey (joe.mccaffrey.2018@mumail.ie)
2021 Exam with Solutions
2021 May exam (online timed assessment) + solutions
Problem sets
Important equations of electromagnetism
Here is a list of the main equations and results we encounter in MP204.
Practice Problems
Topics covered in Class
We point below to relevant chapters in
Prof. Nash's Notes and
in
Vol. II of the Feynman lectures (referred to as Feynman II below).
Of course, equivalent material is available in many other textbooks,
or in online material such as those linked to further down on this page.
Maxwell's equations, displacement current
density, wave solutions.
Chapters 18 and 20 in Feynman II.
Nash notes: chapters V and VI.
Electromagnetic Induction; Faraday's law.
Chapters 16 and 17 in Feynman II.
Nash notes: chapter V.
Vector Potential.
Chapter 15 in Feynman II.
Unfortunately, Nash notes do not discuss the vector potential.
Magnetic field.
Chapters 13 and 14 in Feynman II.
Nash notes: chapter IV.
Electric Currents.
Chapter 13 in Feynman II.
Nash notes: chapter 3.
Applications of Gauss' law.
In Feynman II, Chapter 5 is highly recommended reading.
In Nash notes, this is chapter 2.
Electric flux. Gauss' dielectric flux theorem
(a.k.a. Gauss' law).
In Feynman II, the discussion of flux begins in Chapter 4 Section 5,
and continues through Chapter 5. Nash-notes covers this
material in Chapter 2.
Continuous charge distributions.
In class, we worked out how to calculate the potential and the
electric field due to a continuous
distribution of charge by first calculating the contribution due to an
infinitesimal element and then integrating (``adding up''). This is
an important technique which will recur throughout this module; please
make sure you are able to set up integrals like this yourself.
Some common examples are discussed in
this
video,
this video,
this video,
this video.
Coulomb's Law, Electric Fields,
Electric Potentials.
Chapter 1 of Nash-notes. The introduction to the electric potential
in Nash-notes Chapter 1 Section 3 is more detailed than we had time
for in class; you might want to read this carefully.
In Feynman lectures Vol. II, you will find similar material
in the first 4 sections of Chapter 4.
Overview and Background.
In Feynman lectures Vol. II, Chapter 1 gives an overview of what we
will learn this semester.
Chapters 2 and 3 introduces grad-div-curl and vector integration.
You are supposed to know most of this material already. Working
through them will be a great help for MP204.
Textbooks, lecture notes, etc
Scanned lecture notes from Dr. Masud Hague
Scanned lecture notes, part A. (Up to page 7)
Scanned lecture notes, part B. (Pages 8 to 16)
Scanned lecture notes, part C. (Pages 17 to 37)
Scanned lecture notes, part D. (Pages 39 to 59)
Scanned lecture notes, part E. (Pages 61 to 83)
Lecture notes from Prof. Charles Nash
MP204 lecture notes of Prof. Charles Nash --- this is roughly the material to be covered in the module, with some additions. It is recommended that you work through these notes, and in addition spend significant time working through at least one textbook.
Textbooks
There are many, many textbooks on introductory electromagnetism or electrodynamics. You are strongly encouraged to read through one or more textbooks.
For example, you could work through the Feynman lectures (Volume II), which are free to read on this website. The material we will cover in MP204 is mostly contained within the first 20 chapters of Volume II. (Specifically: Chapters 1, 4--6, 13--18, 20.) This will be very close to what we will cover. However, the material is very standard and you will find the same topics in many other texts.
Other texts:
Material available online:
Lecture notes from various places.
Of course, we didn't check in detail for correctness and/or how
closely these notes are aligned to the matter we cover in MP204, so
please use at your own discretion.
Please let us know if any of the links don't work.
Notation
We use SI (also called MKS or MKSA) units. Note that many equations look quite different when written in Gaussian (or CGS) units. When reading a textbook, be sure to watch out for which units that text is using.
Notations vary. We mostly try using the same notations as in Prof. Nash's notes, but do not always succeed. You anyway need to be able to read and learn from multiple sources using different notations for the same physical quantities.
(Solutions to) previous exams + Sample Exams
Here is a sample exam for practice: Sample exam 1, for 2018-2019
Here is the 2019 May exam and here is the 2019 Repeat (August) exam. (Solutions are not available; sorry.)
Below are solutions to some past exams.
(The length
of exams has changed since 2017.)
Below are old sample exams for practice. They are in the style of previous (2017-2018) exams. Later exams was structured slightly differently (divided into 4 questions instead of 3), but the material covered and the level of difficulty should be similar.
Prerequisite: Vector Calculus
This module requires you to be very familiar with Vector Calculus. You should be comfortable with grad/div/curl, Stokes' theorem and the divergence theorem, and of course vector addition and components.
If you need a review, you can try working through some of the following. We strongly suggest making time to do this at the beginning of semester.
This webpage is based on the webpage originally prepared by Dr. Masud Hague.