In publishing this book, another of our objectives was to show how the
massive use of the Fourier transformation and the concomitant panoply
of properties enabled the uniform solution of Maxwell’s equations in a
medium invariant in translation in a plane. All the elementary waves considered are therefore the result of a double spectral decomposition, first over time and then over the two dimensions of this plane of invariance. We leave it to the reader to discover, in particular in the chapter on frequential
wave packets, the consequences of this temporal Fourier transformation for
describing interference phenomena in the harmonic regime, a regime where
time is excluded and in which space dominates
This book is effectively divided into three parts: first there are five introductory chapters dedicated to the sometimes quite detailed presentation of generic ideas related to Maxwell’s equations. The use of both frequential and spatial wave packets, drawing on the formalism of distributions and their Fourier transforms, provides an anchor for a uniquely macroscopic description of all the classical concepts of electromagnetism (polarization of matter, inertia, dispersion and absorption, causality, spatial and temporal coherence linked with detection, resolution in time and space, polarization of light, etc.).