Bibliography

Louis de Broglie. Electromagnetic Waves in Waveguides and Hollow Resonators. State Publishing House of Foreign Literature, Moscow, 1948, 105 pp., price 8 rubles 20 kopecks.

De Broglie’s small but very substantial book will be of considerable help to those embarking on serious work in the theory of waveguides.

After a brief electrodynamic introduction, which contains, alongside the usual methods for finding solutions of Maxwell’s equations, also more recent methods (for example, § 5 of the first chapter), the author considers the propagation of waves in regular metallic waveguides, among which he includes the coaxial line as well. This treatment naturally leads to the usual results.

More original are the paragraphs dealing with questions of the stability of waves in elliptic waveguides, the velocity of energy flow in waveguides, and the problem of exciting waveguides (this paragraph has been revised by the editor on the basis of Soviet works).

Next, the natural oscillations of various hollow resonators are considered. The valuable material of this chapter is not original, but is presented in a very good form.

The author then considers two ways of taking account of losses in the walls of a waveguide and shows that, strictly speaking, in a real waveguide there can be no waves of purely electric or purely magnetic type if the wave index exceeds zero.

The extremely brief exposition of the theory of the dielectric waveguide leaves the reader dissatisfied; this is all the more regrettable since, in Soviet literature, dielectric waveguides in general receive too little attention.

Of great interest is the chapter on the diffraction of waves at the output from waveguides, where the shortcomings of the usual Kirchhoff method are clarified and a conclusion is given (as applied to concrete cases) that is more accurate than the earlier equations.

All the material is presented very concisely, but sufficiently clearly. The translation is well done. The editor has supplemented the bibliography with a not very complete list of Soviet works; it is regrettable that in the text of the book most of these works received no discussion at all.

I. Malov