This book emphasizes fundamental principles, deriving intriguing properties from these foundations. Simultaneously, it highlights the essential challenges of Classical Electrodynamics and introduces the basic ideas of Quantum Electrodynamics.

This book begins with a brief introduction and then continues with Chapters 2–3, where it systematically constructs Classical Electrodynamics from first principles. Chapter 2 delves into the covariant formulation of Special Relativity, providing an introduction to tensors for students who may not have encountered them in a Mathematical Methods course. Following this, Chapter 3 guides students in building Classical Electrodynamics as a theory of charged particles and the electromagnetic field. Both the Lorentz force equation and Maxwell’s equations are derived from first principles, such as the principle of relativity, Hamilton’s principle, and gauge invariance.

The second part of the book, covered in Chapters 4 and 5, allows readers to apply the powerful relativistic techniques developed in the first part. This enables them to obtain physically relevant solutions of Maxwell’s equations without the need to solve complicated partial differential equations. This approach facilitates the determination of the electromagnetic fields of point charges in arbitrary motion. Additionally, Chapter 5 explains how to apply these solutions to address the fundamental issue of electromagnetic radiation emitted by accelerated charges and explores its consequences, including applications to modern particle accelerators.

In the third part of the book, the limitations of Classical Electrodynamics encountered throughout the previous chapters are brought together and used to motivate the quantum description of the interaction between charged elementary particles and the electromagnetic field. Chapter 6 introduces the basic ideas and conceptual foundations of Quantum Electrodynamics from the perspective of quantum field theory, presenting it as a natural continuation of Classical Electrodynamics.

Exercises with answers are integrated throughout the text to accompany the theoretical development, together with historical notes and biographical remarks that place the material in its scientific context.

Carlos Muñoz is Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), where he currently teaches Classical Electrodynamics at the undergraduate level and served as coordinator of the Physics degree programme from 2009 to 2013. He is a member of the UAM-CSIC Institute for Theoretical Physics (IFT), one of Spain's Severo Ochoa Centres of Excellence, where he served as director from 2012 to 2015.

Throughout his career, he has spent seven years conducting research abroad at the University of Oxford, CERN, and KAIST (South Korea), and has also undertaken shorter research stays at various institutions worldwide. His research focuses on elementary particle physics and astroparticle physics, particularly the phenomenology of supersymmetric and superstring theories and the study of dark matter.

He has authored more than 140 scientific papers, delivered over 150 invited talks, and organized more than 25 international conferences. He founded the international conference series The Dark Side of the Universe (DSU), has led numerous research projects in particle physics and dark matter, and has served on advisory committees for international conferences, academic schools, and research projects.