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The wave equation is a second-order linear partial differential equation for the description of waves or standing wave fields such as mechanical waves (e.g. water waves, sound waves and seismic waves) or electromagnetic waves (including light waves). It arises in fields like acoustics, electromagnetism, and fluid dynamics.
The electromagnetic wave equation is a second-order partial differential equation that describes the propagation of electromagnetic waves through a medium or in a vacuum. It is a three-dimensional form of the wave equation. The homogeneous form of the equation, written in terms of either the electric field E or the magnetic field B, takes the form:
The phase velocity is the rate at which the phase of the wave propagates in space. The group velocity is the rate at which the wave envelope, i.e. the changes in amplitude, propagates. The wave envelope is the profile of the wave amplitudes; all transverse displacements are bound by the envelope profile.
The Helmholtz equation has a variety of applications in physics and other sciences, including the wave equation, the diffusion equation, and the Schrödinger equation for a free particle. In optics, the Helmholtz equation is the wave equation for the electric field. [1] The equation is named after Hermann von Helmholtz, who studied it in 1860. [2]
When these approaches are compared, the use of the Schrödinger equation is sometimes called "wave mechanics". The Klein-Gordon equation is a wave equation which is the relativistic version of the Schrödinger equation. The Schrödinger equation is nonrelativistic because it contains a first derivative in time and a second derivative in space ...
An example Archived 2011-01-19 at the Wayback Machine of solving a nonhomogeneous wave equation from www.exampleproblems.com;
The Schrödinger equation determines how wave functions evolve over time, and a wave function behaves qualitatively like other waves, such as water waves or waves on a string, because the Schrödinger equation is mathematically a type of wave equation. This explains the name "wave function", and gives rise to wave–particle duality.
As an example of propagation without dispersion, consider wave solutions to the following wave equation from classical physics =, where c is the speed of the wave's propagation in a given medium. Using the physics time convention, e − iωt , the wave equation has plane-wave solutions u ( x , t ) = e i ( k ⋅ x − ω ( k ) t ...