The non-birefringent limit of all linear, skewonless media and its unique light-cone structure

Abstract

Based on a recent work by Schuller et al., a geometric representation of all skewonless, non-birefringent, linear media is obtained. The derived constitutive law is based on a "core", encoding the optical metric up to a constant. All further corrections are provided by two (anti-)selfdual bivectors, and an "axion". The bivectors are found to vanish if the optical metric has signature (3,1) - that is, if the Fresnel equation is hyperbolic. We propose applications of this result in the context of transformation optics and premetric electrodynamics.

12 pages, REVTeX; v2: typos; v3: relevant changes in text, reorganization of manuscript; v4: new section added, final version, to appear in Annalen der Physik

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• Hiding Under the Carpet: a New Strategy for Cloaking
• General Relativity in Electrical Engineering
• Relativistic analysis of magnetoelectric crystals: extracting a new 4-dimensional P odd and T odd pseudoscalar from Cr_2 O_3 data
• On light propagation in premetric electrodynamics. Covariant dispersion relation
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