Compact visualization of electromagnetic time-harmonic fields

The paper presents a compact visualization scheme for electromagnetic time-harmonic fields, which replaces the visualization of six plots with that of a single plot. These six plots are those of the magnitude and the phase for the three Cartesian field components of interest (either electric or magnetic) at the points of a computational space. The single plot shows in three dimensional space the lengths and the orientations of both the major and the minor axes for the general polarization ellipse that corresponds to the six plots. This compact visualization is especially useful for the near field which often has all three components non-zero. This compact visualization scheme can also be extended from time-harmonic signals to arbitrary time signals by using the concept of analytic signals as the generalization of complex numbers.