The Zenneck wave, Zenneck surface wave or Sommerfeld-Zenneck surface wave is a longitudinal, inhomogeneous or non-uniform electromagnetic

plane wave In physics, a plane wave is a special case of wave or field: a physical quantity whose value, at any moment, is constant through any plane that is perpendicular to a fixed direction in space. For any position \vec x in space and any time t, ...

incident at the complex

Brewster's angle Brewster's angle (also known as the polarization angle) is an angle of incidence at which light with a particular polarization is perfectly transmitted through a transparent dielectric surface, with ''no reflection''. When ''unpolarized'' light ...

onto a planar or spherical boundary interface between two homogeneous media having different dielectric constants.Corum, K.L. and J.F. Corum, “Bell Labs and the ‘Crucial’ 1936 Seneca Lake Experiment.” Republished as: The Zenneck wave propagates parallel to the interface and decays exponentially vertical to it, a property known as

evanescence Evanescence is an American rock band founded in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1995 by singer and musician Amy Lee and guitarist Ben Moody. After recording independent EPs as a duo in the late 90's, and a demo CD, Evanescence released their debut ...

. It exists under the condition that the

permittivity In electromagnetism, the absolute permittivity, often simply called permittivity and denoted by the Greek letter ''ε'' (epsilon), is a measure of the electric polarizability of a dielectric. A material with high permittivity polarizes more in ...

of one of the materials forming the interface is negative, while the other one is positive, as for example the interface between air and a lossy conducting medium such as the terrestrial transmission line, below the

plasma frequency Plasma oscillations, also known as Langmuir waves (after Irving Langmuir), are rapid oscillations of the electron density in conducting media such as plasmas or metals in the ultraviolet region. The oscillations can be described as an instability i ...

. Arising from original analysis by Arnold Sommerfeld and

Jonathan Zenneck Jonathan Adolf Wilhelm Zenneck (15 April 1871 – 8 April 1959) was a German physicist and electrical engineer who contributed to researches in radio circuit performance and to the scientific and educational contributions to the literature of t ...

of the problem of wave propagation over a lossy earth, it exists as an exact solution to

Maxwell's equations Maxwell's equations, or Maxwell–Heaviside equations, are a set of coupled partial differential equations that, together with the Lorentz force law, form the foundation of classical electromagnetism, classical optics, and electric circuits. ...

. Recently in 2020, it was demonstrated by Oruganti et al., that it was possible to excite Zenneck wave type waves on flat metal-air interfaces and transmit power across metal obstacles.S. K. Oruganti, A. Khosla and T. G. Thundat, "Wireless Power-Data Transmission for Industrial Internet of Things: Simulations and Experiments," in IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 187965-187974, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3030658 .

References

Electromagnetism Surface waves {{technology-stub

See also

References