On the energy-momentum of light : an all optical view of the Abraham-Minkowski controversy

MacLeod, Alexander J. and Noble, Adam (2017) On the energy-momentum of light : an all optical view of the Abraham-Minkowski controversy. In: 2nd Conference on Extremely High Intensity Laser Physics, 2017-09-05 - 2017-09-08, Instituto Superior Tecnico.

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Abstract

The energy-momentum of light in a medium is known to have two conflicting descriptions, due to Abraham and Minkowski. In non-linear electrodynamics, a strong field can cause the vacuum to behave analogously to a dielectric material. We investigate the Abraham-Minkowski controversy in this context, and show that for non-linear electrodynamics in vacuum, the Minkowski description is the most natural.