Analogue Gravity in Hyperbolic Metamaterials

Abstract

Metamaterials are artificial materials whose electromagnetic parameters can be properly designed to achieve many interesting properties not found in natural materials. With a convenient design they demonstrate an analogy between their electrodynamics and general relativity phenomena. In this work we discuss the unusual optical properties of hyperbolic metamaterials and show that the wave equation for light propagation in these media is formally equivalent to the Klein-Gordon equation for a scalar field. Based on these results, the analogue gravity in hyperbolic metamaterials is considered to model an expanding Universe in a (2+1)-dimensional de Sitter spacetime.