URSI Commission B and the URSI Board of Officers have established the URSI Commission B International Electromagnetics Prize. The prize is US$10,000 plus a commemorative plaque and is sponsored by the SUMMA Foundation. It is awarded for an accurate approximate solution of a designated scattering or related problem in electromagnetics and is presented at an appropriate URSI meeting.

The last 30 years have seen enormous advances in the application of numerical techniques in electromagnetics but there have not been comparable advances in our knowledge of the scattering from simple geometric shapes. It is hoped that the prize will encourage the development of accurate, physically-based approximate analytical expressions for the solution of canonical and similar problems.

The designated annual prize problem is announced on the URSI Web page (http://www.ursi.org) and elsewhere, and solutions are due approximately 16 months after the announcement date. Entries must be in English in the format of a manuscript submitted to the journal Radio Science and must not exceed 25 pages in length, including tables, figures and references. Hard copy or electronic submission is acceptable. Entries will be judged by a panel appointed by the Chair of URSI Commission B and the SUMMA Foundation. Factors taken into account in the judging will be the simplicity and elegance of the expressions, their conformity with the known physical properties of the solution, and their accuracy for all values of the parameters involved in the problem. The winner will be announced approximately five months after the submission date. The panel reserves the right to withhold the award if no worthy entry is received.

All scientists are eligible for the prize apart from an officer or Director of the SUMMA Foundation, a member of the panel, or one of their immediate working associates. Multiple authorship is allowed.

2005 Prize Problem (announced February 2004)

The competition problem is the determination of the scattering of a uniform plane wave by a perfectly conducting right circular cone of semi-infinite extent. In terms of spherical coordinates, with the cone axis coincident with the polar axis and the tip of the cone at the origin, the conical surface is specified by with . The objective is the determination of the scattering matrix for the exterior problem for either time-harmonic or time-dependent excitation.

There is a sizable body of literature on this problem, but solutions are not known in simple form for all ranges of the problem parameters, nor are accuracy bounds or validity checks known for the available solutions. A solution should be in the form of readily computable, approximate expressions, accompanied by specifications of accuracy and ranges of validity. An acceptable numerical solution must be accompanied by expressions that approximate data. A minimally acceptable solution might be one for which either the incident or scattered wave (but not both) is axial. Contestants are encouraged to submit a solution that is as general as feasible for which the accuracy is specified and for which numerical values can be obtained by simple computations. A solution for which the specified range of validity is limited but for which the accuracy is tightly bounded will be looked upon more favorably than one that holds over a greater range but for which the accuracy is not tightly bounded. Validity and bounds may be based on appeals to, for example, first principles, symmetry, and/or observations drawn from a sufficiently large set of data.

A solution of the cone problem without accuracy bounds, worthy though it may be, is not in accord with the objectives of the competition. Neither is a solution for which much labor is required to obtain numerical values.

The members of the competition panel are C. E. Baum, C. M. Butler (Chair), K. J. Langenberg, T. B. A. Senior, and S. Ström. 

Entries in the format described above must be received on or before 15 June 2005 by :

Professor Chalmers M. Butler
336 Fluor Daniel EIB
Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Clemson University
Clemson, SC 39634-9015, USA
Phone: +1 864-656-5922
Fax: +1 864-656-7200
E-mail : cbutler@eng.clemson.edu

Send your comments or questions to : cbutler@eng.clemson.edu

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