Optical metrics and birefringence of anisotropic media (Q2576768)

The authors show that the material tensor of an anisotropic medium with uniaxial symmetry can be constructed out of those two optical metrics which describe ordinary and extraordinary light propagation. This generalizes the corresponding representation of the material tensor in isotropic media in terms of Gordon's optical metric. The internal geometrical structure is clarified which underlies the decomposition of the material tensor into a combination of products of two symmetric second rank tensor fields. A generalized symmetry property of Minkowski's energy-momentum tensor is recovered.