Hermitian structures defined by linear electromagnetic constitutive laws

Abstract

It is demonstrated that when the bundle of 2-forms on a four-dimensional manifold M admits an almost-complex structure any choice of "real + imaginary" subspace decomposition of the bundle defines a conjugation map, as well as a Hermitian structure for the bundle. When the almost-complex structure comes from a linear electromagnetic constitutive law, the real and imaginary parts of the Hermitian structure are then shown to represent the Hamiltonian for an anisotropic three-dimensional electromagnetic oscillator at each point of M and a symplectic structure for each fiber. The complex form of the oscillator equations is also definable in terms of the geometric structures that were introduced.