EM pickup and scattering by a wire

Abstract

This article treats pickup and scattering by a single wire in free space or over a ground plane. The wire may be uniform or nonuniform and infinite or finite. We only treat the case where wire radius is so small compared to a wavelength and the other problem dimensions that scattering by the wire is independent of azimuth. Solutions based directly on Maxwell's equations are compared with solutions based on the telegrapher's equations; for 1 mm radius Cu wire at 1 GHz, equilibrium CW currents as computed from the two models, for a uniform, infinite wire, differ by 6 dB. In general, the wire-current solutions are separated into a homogeneous part and a particular or driven part. The driven part couples and scatters fields, while,at least on an infinite wire in the far field, the homogeneous part does not.