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Record Id 43979
Title New perspectives on the relevance of gravitation for the covariant description of electromagnetically polarizable media
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Abstract By recognising that stress-energy-momentum tensors are funda- mentally related to gravitation in spacetime it is argued that the classi- cal 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 ba- sic 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 relativis- tic gravitation. General constitutive properties of material continua are formulated in terms of spacetime tensors including those that de- scribe 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 vari- ational derivatives to calculate stress-energy-momentum tensors is discussed in some detail. The relation of this result to tensors pro- posed 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 electro- magnetic fields is stressed.
Organisation CI
Keywords Physics
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Language English (EN)
Type Details URI(s) Local file(s) Year
Report CI Preprints 07-01. 2007. Cockcroft-07-01.pdf 2007
Journal Article J Phys A-Math Theor 40, no. 21 (2007): 5695-5715. doi:10.1088/1751-8113/40/21/016 2007