Hyperbolic Metamaterials and Massive Klein-Gordon Equation in 2+1 Dimensional de Sitter Spacetime

Abstract

The wave equation obeyed by the extraordinary component of the electric field in a hyperbolic metamaterial was shown to be a massless Klein-Gordon field living in a flat spacetime with two timelike and two spacelike dimensions. Such a wave equation, unexpectedly, allows dispersionless propagation albeit having two spatial dimensions. Here we show that the same equation can be naturally interpreted as a particular massive Klein-Gordon equation with the usual one timelike and two spacelike dimensions in a de Sitter (dS) background spacetime. The mass parameter of the scalar field is given in terms of the cosmological constant, Planck constant and the speed of light as $m =\sqrt{\Lambda}\frac{\hbar}{c}$ which corresponds to the point for which the left and right conformal weights of the boundary conformal field theory (CFT) (via the de Sitter/CFT correspondence) are equal. This particular mass corresponds to the gapless mode in the dS spacetime for which the dispersion relation is linear in the wave number.