Related papers: Riemannian light cone from vanishing birefringence…
Within the axiomatic premetric approach to classical electrodynamics, we derive under which covariant conditions the quartic Fresnel surface represents a unique light cone without birefringence in vacuum.
We study the wave propagation in nonlinear electrodynamical models. Particular attention is paid to the derivation and the analysis of the Fresnel equation for the wave covectors. For the class of general nonlinear Lagrangian models, we…
We formulate a general framework for describing the electromagnetic properties of spacetime. These properties are encoded in the `constitutive tensor of the vacuum', a quantity analogous to that used in the description of material media. We…
Classical electrodynamics can be based on the conservation laws of electric charge and magnetic flux. Both laws are independent of the metric and the linear connection of spacetime. Within the framework of such a premetric electrodynamics…
Working on the approximation of low frequency, we present the light cone conditions for a class of theories constructed with the two gauge invariants of the Maxwell field without making use of average over polarization states. Different…
The fermion sector of the pseudo-quantum electrodynamics is integrated functionally to generate a non-linear electrodynamics, that it is called Euler-Heisenberg pseudo-electrodynamics. A non-local Chern-Simons topological term is added to…
Quantum electrodynamics predicts the vacuum to behave as a non-linear medium, including effects such as birefringence. However, for experimentally available field strengths, this vacuum polarizability is extremely small and thus very hard…
Vacuum magnetic birefringence is one of the most interesting non-linear phenomena in quantum electrodynamics because it is a pure photon-photon result of the theory and it directly signalizes the violation of the classical superposition…
The Fresnel equation governing the propagation of electromagnetic waves for the most general linear constitutive law is derived. The wave normals are found to lie, in general, on a fourth order surface. When the constitutive coefficients…
Exact electromagnetic wave solutions to Maxwell equations on anisotropic Bianchi I cosmological spacetime backgrounds are studied. The waves evolving on Bianchi I spacetimes exhibit birefringence (associated to linear polarization) and…
The propagation of light through bianisotropic materials is studied in the geometrical optics approximation. For that purpose, we use the quartic general dispersion equation specified by the Tamm-Rubilar tensor, which is cubic in the…
The theory of nonlinear diffraction of intensive light beams propagating through photorefractive media is developed. Diffraction occurs on a reflecting wire embedded in the nonlinear medium at relatively small angle with respect to the…
Geometric optics effectively describes the propagation of electromagnetic waves when the wavelength is much smaller than the characteristic length scale of the medium, making wave phenomena like diffraction negligible. As a result, light…
We present a concise new definition of Finsler spacetimes that generalize Lorentzian metric manifolds and provide consistent backgrounds for physics. Extending standard mathematical constructions known from Finsler spaces we show that…
Birefringence is one of the fascinating properties of the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in strong electromagnetic fields. The scattering of linearly polarized incident probe photons into a perpendicularly polarized mode provides a…
Feynman's laws of quantum dynamics are concisely stated, discussed in comparison with other formulations of quantum mechanics and applied to selected problems in the physical optics of photons and massive particles as well as flavour…
Geometrical optics describes, with good accuracy, the propagation of high-frequency plane waves through an electromagnetic medium. Under such approximation, the behaviour of the electromagnetic fields is characterised by just three…
Light propagation is investigated in the context of local anisotropic nonlinear dielectric media at rest with the dielectric coefficients $\epsilon^\mu{}_\nu = \epsilon^\mu{}_\nu (\vec{E},\vec{B})$ and constant $\mu$, in the limit of…
We analyze the propagation of light in the context of nonlinear electrodynamics, as it occurs in modified QED vacua. We show that the corresponding characteristic equation can be described in terms of a modification of the effective…
In conventional Maxwell--Lorentz electrodynamics, the propagation of light is influenced by the metric, not, however, by the possible presence of a torsion T. Still the light can feel torsion if the latter is coupled nonminimally to the…