New perspectives on the relevance of gravitation for the covariant description of electromagnetically polarizable media

DOI10.1088/1751-8113/40/21/016zbMATH Open1116.83021arXivmath-ph/0610082OpenAlexW2951739701MaRDI QIDQ3445841FDOQ3445841

Authors: Tekin Dereli, Jonathan Gratus, R. W. Tucker 

Publication date: 7 June 2007

Published in: Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Electromagnetic properties of a simple polarisable medium may be parameterised in terms of a constitutive tensor whose properties can in principle be determined by experiments in non-inertial (accelerating) frames and in the presence of weak but variable gravitational fields. After establishing some geometric notation, discussion is given to basic concepts of stress, energy and momentum in the vacuum where the useful notion of a drive form is introduced in order to associate the conservation of currents involving the flux of energy, momentum and angular momentum with spacetime isometries. The definition of the stress-energy-momentum tensor is discussed with particular reference to its symmetry based on its role as a source of relativistic gravitation. General constitutive properties of material continua are formulated in terms of spacetime tensors including those that describe magneto-electric phenomena in moving media. This leads to a formulation of a self-adjoint constitutive tensor describing, in general, inhomogeneous, anisotropic, magneto-electric bulk matter in arbitrary motion. The question of an invariant characterisation of intrinsically magneto-electric media is explored. An action principle is established to generate the phenomenological Maxwell system and the use of variational derivatives to calculate stress-energy-momentum tensors is discussed in some detail. The relation of this result to tensors proposed by Abraham and others is discussed in the concluding section where the relevance of the whole approach to experiments on matter in non-inertial environments with variable gravitational and electromagnetic fields is stressed.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0610082

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Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Gravitational energy and conservation laws; groups of motions (83C40) Relativistic gravitational theories other than Einstein's, including asymmetric field theories (83D05) Gravitational waves (83C35)

Cited In (12)

• On gravity as a medium property in Maxwell equations
• Evaporating black-holes, wormholes, and vacuum polarisation: must they always conserve charge?
• The covariant description of electromagnetically polarizable media
• Metric energy-momentum tensor for polarizable particles in an electromagnetic field
• Conservation laws and stress-energy-momentum tensors for systems with background fields
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Wormholes in the non-minimally coupled gravity with electromagnetism
• Forces and momenta caused by electromagnetic waves in magnetoelectric media
• Levi-Civita effect in the polarizable vacuum (PV) representation of general relativity
• Covariant constitutive relations and relativistic inhomogeneous plasmas
• On the possibility of classical vacuum polarization and magnetization
• The electrodynamics of inhomogeneous rotating media and the Abraham and Minkowski tensors. I. General theory.

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