Transversal Waves in Electromagnetics: A Survey with New Generalizations

Abstract

The goals of our paper are to survey, extend, and (most importantly) unify the known, scattered specifics about the computational savings that accrue in calculating fields that are transverse electromagnetic/electric/magnetic, the conditions that allow or inhibit such modes, a sampling of rigorously solved physical configurations that illustrate these restrictions, various rationalizations offered for employing them in contradiction to the restrictions, and situations for which the transverse modes can be shown to be complete. We describe new theorems establishing and exploiting the completeness under very general conditions.