Wave-scattering approaches to conservation and causality (Q1109718)

A system can be described in diverse manners. A complex system description uses, among others, a specification of system elements (subsystems) and their couplings (interconnections). There are many ways to describe the system topology. The most common structural description is based on the circuit conventions of Kirchhoff. The wave-scattering formalism is an alternative approach which conceives uniformly both the topology and the dynamics of a system, in particular, of an energetic system. In the reviewed paper it is shown that this formalism may be applied to systems with linear as well as nonlinear elements. The paper consists of an introduction and sections entitled as following: What are wave-scattering methods (among others, scattering representation of elements and their bounds) ? Conservation of energy and continuity of power, causality constraints and scattering relations, why using wave- scattering methods ? Universality of the scattering representation, orthogonality of nonenergic S-matrices, unitarity of lossless S-matrices, how to apply wave-scattering methods ? Interconnection of one-port S- matrices, multiport S-matrices transmission lines, irreducible multiport elements. As a conclusion the authors formulate the statement that the most commonly used means of modeling a physical system is to describe the system in terms of primitive elements whose interrelations are sketched using circuit conventions. Such models introduce conservation laws in a straightforward manner, but are generally not able to elucidate causal relations. In this paper, wave-scattering methods are discussed as an alternative approach to physical system modelling. It is shown that the wave-scattering approach intrinsically deals with causal relations and can explicitly include conservation laws.