Evolution of waves after plasma ignition in a sphere

Abstract

The transformation of an incident plane harmonic wave caused by instant creation of a plasma sphere is investigated. Two stages of field evolution is shown. At the early stage a spatial and temporal field structure is similar partly to the case of an unbounded medium. Transients in the form of a nonstationary wave spectrum are observed at the second stage. The exact expressions for the transformed field is obtained by virtue of the solution of an initial and boundary value electromagnetic problem for Maxwell's equations based on the longitudinal and transverse spherical vector functions.