A New Energy Conservation Law for Time-Harmonic Electromagnetic Fields and Its Applications

Abstract: We report a new energy conservation law for time-harmonic electromagnetic fields, which is valid for an arbitrary medium. In contrast to the well-established Poynting theorem for time-harmonic fields, the real part of the new energy conservation law gives an equation for the sum of stored electric and magnetic field energies and the imaginary part involves an equation related to the difference between the dissipated electric and magnetic energies. Universally applicable expressions for both the electric and magnetic field energies have been obtained and demonstrated to be valuable in characterizing the energy storage and transport properties in complex media. For a lossless isotropic and homogeneous medium, the new energy conservation law implies that the stored electromagnetic field energy of a radiating system enclosed by a surface is equal to the total field energy inside the surface subtracted by the energy flowing out of the surface.