Revisiting the Abraham-Minkowski Dilemma

Abstract

Here, the Abraham-Minkowski controversy on the correct definition of the light momentum in a macroscopic medium is revisited with the purpose to highlight that an effective medium formalism necessarily restricts the available information on the internal state of a system, and that this is ultimately the reason why the dilemma has no universal solution. Despite these difficulties, it is demonstrated that in the limit of no material absorption and under steady-state conditions, the time-averaged light (kinetic) momentum may be unambiguously determined by the Abraham result, both for bodies at rest and for circulatory flows of matter. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of quantum optics of moving media, and we examine in detail the fundamental role of the Minkowski momentum in such a context.

34 pages, under review

References in corpus (8)

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• Optical momentum and angular momentum in complex media: From the Abraham-Minkowski debate to unusual properties of surface plasmon-polaritons
• No quantum friction between uniformly moving plates
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• Wave Instabilities and Unidirectional Light Flow in a Cavity with Rotating Walls
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• Negative spontaneous emission by a moving two-level atom

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• Spontaneous lateral atomic recoil force close to a photonic topological material
• Radiation Forces and the Abraham-Minkowski Problem
• Quantized Angular Momentum in Topological Optical Systems
• The Schrödinger Formalism of Electromagnetism and Other Classical Waves --- How to Make Quantum-Wave Analogies Rigorous
• Classical Emergence of Intrinsic Spin-Orbit Interaction of Light at the Nanoscale
• An Integrodifferential Equation for Electromagnetic Fields in Linear Dispersive Media
• Optical force density and surface displacements in transparent dielectrics due to non-ionizing sub-picosecond laser excitation
• A heuristic resolution of the Abraham-Minkowski controversy
• Electromagnetic energy, momentum and forces in a dielectric medium with losses
• About conservation the angular momentum for asymmetric tensors in electrodynamics