Electromagnetic wave propagation inside a material medium: an effective geometry interpretation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric approach to model electromagnetic wave propagation in nonlinear and anisotropic media, providing a new perspective on light paths and effective geometries in complex materials.

Contribution

It develops a method to represent electromagnetic wave paths inside nonlinear and birefringent media using effective geometry, extending Maxwell's theory in the low frequency limit.

Findings

Effective geometries for isotropic media derived

Artificial birefringence effects modeled geometrically

Light paths characterized in nonlinear media

Abstract

We present a method developed to deal with electromagnetic wave propagation inside a material medium that reacts, in general, non-linearly to the field strength. We work in the context of Maxwell' s theory in the low frequency limit and obtain a geometrical representation of light paths for each case presented. The isotropic case and artificial birefringence caused by an external electric field are analyzed as an application of the formalism and the effective geometry associated to the wave propagation is exhibited.