Discussion Forum

It would help if you cited a particular paper or explained the particular context. Regardless, I can tell you that in any realistic context, E0 is not simply the sum of the individual components, since that would generally have no useful physical meaning. In a time domain context, people might use E0 to indicate an initial value (i.e., at t=0) of the magnitude of the field, or perhaps of an unlabeled vector component of the field. In frequency domain, E0 would typically be used to indicate the peak amplitude of the (single-frequency) sinusoidal oscillation being considered. Another good possibility is that E0 could refer to the field at a particular reference location or in a particular direction of a spatial or angular distribution of a field. Your expression then might refer to an intensity of (for example) light relative to the intensity somewhere else (such as, but not limited to, a distribution of light in a beam.) Since light intensity is proportional to E^2, I'll take a wild guess that this is your context. But it's just a wild guess. Anyway, if you cite or upload any particular one of the "many papers" to which you refer to this forum, I'm pretty sure that someone here will be able to tell you what the symbols mean within the context of that paper. Best regards.

One important note: Please do not upload to this forum any paper. Even if you or your institution has purchased a license to a paper, this typically does not allow you to republish the paper, or us (COMSOL) to republish the paper. Therefore, as a moderator of this forum I will delete such files.

What you can do instead is provide a link to the paper on its publisher's website.

Thanks,

Jeff