A Capacitor is a Transmission Line.

No editor of a peer reviewed journal can publish an article (and survive as editor) which contains the statement; “A Capacitor is a Transmission line”. The leads to a capacitor are connected to one end of the capacitor plates, not to their centre, as a capacitor is always wrongly drawn. The energy is a TEM wave which enters the capacitor sideways. The fields of a Transverse Electromagnetic (TEM) Wave are sideways, normal to the capacitor plates, and there is no forward magnetic field. So Maxwell’s Displacement Current, which causes a magnetic field in a plane parallel with the plates, is incompatible with the TEM Wave. Classical electromagnetic theory therefore is internally inconsistent, unless we exclude the TEM Wave from the theory. But surely the energy travelling in a USB cable is easily seen to be TEM.

A useful illustration of this point was in Wireless World, December 1978, now at http://www.ivorcatt.org/icrwiworld78dec1.htm

Ivor Catt 6 Nov 2014