Electrodynamics, which appeared in the second half of the 19th century, led to fundamental advances in the invention new physics and the emergence of a huge number of technical applications, without which the life of modern humanity is unthinkable.
The classic monographs of Sommerfeld, Born and Wolf, Landau and Livshits, their students and followers, seemed to sum up the century-long development of science that created the technical basis of our civilization.
However, over the past 30 years, extremely important directions for various applications have emerged, each of which has its own name and is based, of course, on modern electrodynamics of a continuous medium, being at the same time its new developing branch. Among these areas we can highlight the electrodynamics of composite materials, nanooptics, nanophotonics, computational electrodynamics, electrodynamics of photonic crystals, and, finally, the electrodynamics of metamaterials. Each of these directions may seem separate
the field of modern physics.
However, recently, in publications, a sufficient commonness of approaches has increasingly begun to appear, in which, when considering phenomena that have completely different spatial scales, the main parameter of the problem, as it should be, is the ratio of the wavelength to the scale of inhomogeneity. In this case, electrodynamic phenomena manifest themselves principally in the same way for completely different wavelength ranges. Of course, specifics arise when, for some problems of nanophotonics, we cannot use averaged material equations for the electromagnetic field and must take into account the interaction through the Hamiltonian of the microscopic system. Nevertheless, the basic patterns of seemingly completely different wavelength ranges in the problems remain the same.
The editors of the journal “Modern Electrodynamics” are interested in precisely this approach. This allows readers involved in the electrodynamics of composites to easily grasp the ideas presented in papers on nanophotonics, and vice versa. The electronic scientific journal “Modern Electrodynamics” publishes original articles and reviews, as well as extended abstracts of conferences on a wide range of theoretical and applied problems of electrodynamics, optics and electromagnetic properties of materials, etc. Thematic sections of the magazine cover
the most important areas of experimental, theoretical and computational electrodynamics, as well as issues of interaction of electromagnetic fields with material media, the theory of radio wave propagation, application of electrodynamics methods in biology, medicine, nanoelectronics and nanooptics.
Of course, we understand that, as Kozma Prutkov wrote, “no one will embrace the immensity.” Therefore, the editors apologize in advance for rejecting articles, although very good and useful, but of interest to a narrow group of technical specialists. We will also not accept articles refuting classical or quantum electrodynamics, relying in our judgments on traditional approaches that have been repeatedly confirmed by experiment. Even within such traditional approaches, there is still an infinite amount of new and interesting things to explore.
Historically, the idea to publish a journal was born in the team of ITAE RAS, which largely consists of teachers and graduates of the Department of Electrodynamics of Complex Systems and Nanophotonics in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The department was founded by academicians A.M. Dykhne and A.N. Lagarkov and initially bore the name “Department of Applied Theoretical Physics”. The absence of the conjunction “and” between the two adjectives emphasized the need for an inextricable connection between fundamental and applied science. We will try to follow this principle in our publishing
activities.
Editor-in-Chief, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Andrey Lagarkov
