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We exhibit the first analogue model of a rotating black hole constructed in the framework of nonlinear electrodynamics. The background electromagnetic field is assumed to be algebraically special and adapted to a geodesic shear-free congruence of null rays in Minkowski spacetime, the Kerr congruence. The corresponding optical metric has a Kerr-Schild form and, it is shown to be characterized by three parameters, thus predicting the existence of an ergosurface, a horizon, and a slice identical to one also present in the Kerr metric., Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures

We demonstrate the existence of photon traps within the framework of nonlinear electrodynamics. The trapping mechanism is based on the fact that, for null background fields, the optical metric reduces to the Kerr-Schild form, which plays a prominent role in the context of black hole physics. We then construct explicit examples where photons are confined in a region of spacetime, such that a distant observer cannot interact with them. Finally, we argue that the trapping scheme is quite universal, being entirely compatible with causality, energy conditions, and hyperbolicity., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures

We study different types of spacetime singularities which emerge in the context of disformal electrodynamics. The latter is characterized by transformations of the background metric which preserve regular (non-null) solutions of Maxwell equations in vacuum. Restricting ourselves to the case of electrostatic fields created by charged point particles along a line, we show that exotic types of singularities arise., Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures

We scrutinize the geometrical properties of light propagation inside a nonlinear medium modeled by a fully covariant electromagnetic theory in $2+1$-dimensions. After setting the nonlinear constitutive relations, the phase velocity and the polarization of waves are derived and three special cases are analyzed in details. In spite of the dimensional reduction, our model still presents phenomena like one-way propagation, controlled opacity among others for a large class of dielectric and magneto-electric parameters., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures

In this paper, we turn our attention to light propagation in three-dimensional electrodynamics. More specifically, we investigate the behavior of light rays in a continuous bi-dimensional hypothetical medium living in a three-dimensional ambient spacetime. Relying on a fully covariant approach, we assume that the medium is endowed with a local and linear response tensor which maps field strengths into excitations. In the geometric optics limit, we then obtain the corresponding Fresnel equation and, using well-known results from algebraic geometry, we derive the effective optical metric., Comment: 12 pages, matching the published version