A General Power Loss Method for Attenuation of Cavities and Waveguides

The usual power loss method of evaluating the damping constant and Q of cavities and the attenuation constant of waveguides, as caused by finite wall conductivity, breaks down in the case of degenerate modes and fails to predict the coupling between degenerate modes. By means of variational formulations for the lossy case it is shown how the usual power loss method maybe generalized to treat the case when there are degenerate modes present. The generalized method turns out to be a particularly simple extension of the usual procedure.