The non-birefringent limit of all linear, skewonless media and its unique light-cone structure
Optics
2011-02-10 v4 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Abstract
Based on a recent work by Schuller et al., a geometric representation of all skewonless, non-birefringent, linear media is obtained. The derived constitutive law is based on a "core", encoding the optical metric up to a constant. All further corrections are provided by two (anti-)selfdual bivectors, and an "axion". The bivectors are found to vanish if the optical metric has signature (3,1) - that is, if the Fresnel equation is hyperbolic. We propose applications of this result in the context of transformation optics and premetric electrodynamics.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1008.2343,
title = {The non-birefringent limit of all linear, skewonless media and its unique light-cone structure},
author = {Alberto Favaro and Luzi Bergamin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1008.2343},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
12 pages, REVTeX; v2: typos; v3: relevant changes in text, reorganization of manuscript; v4: new section added, final version, to appear in Annalen der Physik