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The term is also used, even more specifically, to mean a "monochromatic" or sinusoidal plane wave: a travelling plane wave whose profile () is a sinusoidal function. That is, (,) = (() +) The parameter , which may be a scalar or a vector, is called the amplitude of the wave; the scalar coefficient is its "spatial frequency"; and the scalar is its "phase shift".
A plane wave is an important mathematical idealization where the disturbance is identical along any (infinite) plane normal to a specific direction of travel. Mathematically, the simplest wave is a sinusoidal plane wave in which at any point the field experiences simple harmonic motion at one frequency.
Because this is a plane wave, each blue vector, indicating the perpendicular displacement from a point on the axis out to the sine wave, represents the magnitude and direction of the electric field for an entire plane that is perpendicular to the axis. Represented in the second illustration is a circularly polarized, electromagnetic plane wave ...
Mathematically, the simplest kind of transverse wave is a plane linearly polarized sinusoidal one. "Plane" here means that the direction of propagation is unchanging and the same over the whole medium; "linearly polarized" means that the direction of displacement too is unchanging and the same over the whole medium; and the magnitude of the displacement is a sinusoidal function only of time ...
In physics and many other areas of science and engineering the intensity or flux of radiant energy is the power transferred per unit area, where the area is measured on the plane perpendicular to the direction of propagation of the energy. [a] In the SI system, it has units watts per square metre (W/m 2), or kg⋅s −3 in base units.
From the quadratic velocity term = (+) = can be seen that there are two waves travelling in opposite directions + and are possible, hence results the designation “two-way wave equation”. It can be shown for plane longitudinal wave propagation that the synthesis of two one-way wave equations leads to a general two-way wave equation.
The wavefronts of a traveling plane wave in three-dimensional space. In mathematics and physics , a traveling plane wave [ 1 ] is a special case of plane wave , namely a field whose evolution in time can be described as simple translation of its values at a constant wave speed c {\displaystyle c} , along a fixed direction of propagation n → ...
Considering a monochromatic plane wave of optical frequency f (light of vacuum wavelength λ has a frequency of f = c/λ where c is the speed of light), let us take the direction of propagation as the z axis. Being a transverse wave the E and H fields must then contain components only in the x and y directions whereas E z = H z = 0.