The Eastwood-Singer gauge in Einstein spaces

Electrodynamics in curved space-time can be studied in the Eastwood–Singer gauge, which has the advantage of respecting the invariance under conformal rescalings of the Maxwell equations. Such a construction is here studied in Einstein spaces, for which the Ricci tensor is proportional to the metric. The classical field equations for the potential are then equivalent to first solving a scalar wave equation with cosmological constant, and then solving a vector wave equation where the inhomogeneous term is obtained from the gradient of the solution of the scalar wave equation. The Eastwood–Singer condition leads to a field equation on the potential which is preserved under gauge transformations provided that the scalar function therein obeys a fourth-order equation where the highest-order term is the wave operator composed with itself. The secondorder scalar equation is here solved in de Sitter space-time, and also the fourth-order equation in a particular case, and these solutions are found to admit an exponential decay at large time provided that square-integrability for positive time is required. Last, the vector wave equation in the Eastwood–Singer gauge is solved explicitly when the potential is taken to depend only on the time variable.