Electromagnetic scalar product in spatially bounded domains

Abstract

Many physically interesting quantities of the electromagnetic field can be computed using the electromagnetic scalar product. However, none of the existing expressions for such scalar product are directly applicable when the fields are only known in a spatially-bounded domain, as is the case for many numerical Maxwell solvers. In here, we derive an expression for the electromagnetic scalar product between radiation fields that only involves integrals over closed spatial surfaces. The expression readily leads to formulas for the number of photons, energy, and helicity of generic polychromatic light pulses of incoming or outgoing character. The capabilities of popular Maxwell solvers in spatially-bounded computational domains are thereby augmented, for example, by a straightforward method for normalizing emitted fields so that they contain a single photon.