Optical properties and energy propagation in a dielectric medium supporting magnetic current

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a dielectric medium supporting magnetic currents affects optical properties and energy transport, revealing unusual behaviors like the decoupling of group and energy velocities.

Contribution

It introduces the analysis of optical and energy propagation in dielectric media with magnetic currents, highlighting novel effects on velocity relations and optical symmetries.

Findings

Magnetic currents in dielectrics break the usual group-energy velocity equivalence.

Nonreciprocal permittivities arise from anisotropic magnetic conductivity.

Group and energy velocities become equivalent in effective absorbing scenarios.

Abstract

We examine a dielectric medium supporting a magnetic current in connection with optical properties and energy propagation. The dispersion relations, propagating modes, and some optical effects are examined for isotropic and anisotropic magnetic conductivity tensors, with the latter ones implying nonreciprocal permittivities. The eigenvalues of the effective permittivity are carried out and associated with the optical symmetries (uniaxial, biaxial) and the subjacent crystal systems. Aspects of electromagnetic energy transport for such systems are also discussed, with the group and energy velocities being presented and carried out for all the particular cases addressed. Our results suggest that a dielectric supporting magnetic current breaks the usual equivalence between group velocity and energy velocity that holds in a nonabsorbing medium, while establishing the equivalence between them in an effective absorbing scenario, two unexpected behaviors.