On the canonical form of the electromagnetic field

Abstract Using the decomposition of an antisymmetric 2-tensor as a sum of two orthogonal bivectors, the various canonical forms of the electromagnetic tensor field are analyzed, recovering known results. However, introducing 1+3 spacetime splitting techniques, the canonical forms are associated to special frames and observers and this helps to clarify the role played by “measurable” quantities (electric and magnetic fields, Poynting vector) in the classification problem itself. Keywords: Electromagnetic field, Canonical form Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 83A05, 78A25