Gravitational closure of weakly birefringent electrodynamics

Abstract

We derive the gravitational dynamics of the tensorial geometry which underlies the most general linear theory of electrodynamics that features weak birefringence in vacuo. This derivation is performed by way of gravitational closure, which is a mechanism that employs the causal structure of any canonically quantizable matter dynamics on some tensorial spacetime geometry in order to derive canonical dynamics for the latter. The resulting eleven-parameter family of weak gravitational field equations allows to predict where vacuum birefringence will occur, if there is any.