Effective metrics and a fully covariant description of constitutive tensors in electrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper develops a fully covariant framework for describing constitutive tensors in electrodynamics, generalizing conditions for effective metric models in complex backgrounds and providing explicit reconstruction formulas.

Contribution

It introduces a fully covariant approach to constitutive tensors, generalizes effective metric conditions to arbitrary backgrounds, and derives explicit metric reconstruction formulas from material tensors.

Findings

Unified covariant formalism for constitutive tensors

Generalized effective metric conditions beyond flat spacetime

Explicit formulas for reconstructing metrics from material tensors

Abstract

Using electromagnetism to study analogue space-times is tantamount to considering consistency conditions for when a given (meta-)material would provide an analogue space-time model or --- vice versa --- characterizing which given metric could be modelled with a (meta-)material. While the consistency conditions themselves are by now well known and studied, the form the metric takes once they are satisfied is not. This question is mostly easily answered by keeping the formalisms of the two research fields here in contact as close to each other as possible. While fully covariant formulations of the electrodynamics of media have been around for a long while, they are usually abandoned for (3+1)- or 6-dimensional formalisms. Here we shall use the fully unified and fully covariant approach. This enables us even to generalize the consistency conditions for the existence of an effective metric to arbitrary background metrics beyond flat space-time electrodynamics. We also show how the familiar matrices for permittivity $\epsilon$, permeability $\mu^{-1}$, and magneto-electric effects $\zeta$ can be seen as the three independent pieces of the Bel decomposition for the constitutive tensor $Z^{abcd}$, i.e., the components of an orthogonal decomposition with respect to a given observer with four-velocity $V^a$. Finally, we shall use the Moore--Penrose pseudo-inverse and the closely related pseudo-determinant to then gain the desired reconstruction of the effective metric in terms of the permittivity tensor $\epsilon^{ab}$, the permeability tensor $[\mu^{-1}]^{ab}$, and the magneto-electric tensor $\zeta^{ab}$, as an explicit function $g_{\text{eff}}(\epsilon,\mu^{-1},\zeta)$.