The Gravitational Magnetoelectric Effect

Abstract

Electromagnetism in spacetime can be treated in terms of an analogue linear dielectric medium. In this paper, we discuss the gravitational analogue of the linear magnetoelectric effect, which can be found in multiferroic materials. While this is known to occur for metrics with non-zero mixed components, we show how it depends on the choice of spatial formalism for the electromagnetic fields, including differences in tensor weight, and also on the choice of coordinate chart. This is illustrated for Langevin–Minkowski, four charts of Schwarzschild spacetime, and two charts of pp gravitational waves.

Keywords

• magnetoelectric effect
• general relativity
• analogue models