General expansion of time transfer functions in optical spacetime

Abstract

When dealing with highly accurate modeling of time and frequency transfers into arbitrarily moving dielectrics medium, it may be convenient to work with Gordon's optical spacetime metric rather than the usual physical spacetime metric. Additionally, an accurate modeling of the geodesic evolution of observable quantities (e.g., the range and the Doppler) requires us to know the reception or the emission time transfer functions. In the physical spacetime, these functions can be derived to any post-Minkowskian orders through a recursive procedure. In this work, we show that the time transfer functions can be determined to any order in Gordon's optical spacetime as well. The exact integral forms of the gravitational, the refractive, and the coupling contributions are recursively derived. The expression of the time transfer function is given within the post-linear approximation assuming a stationary optical spacetime covered with geocentric celestial reference system coordinates. The light-dragging effect due to the steady rotation of the neutral atmosphere of the Earth is found to be at the threshold of visibility in many experiments involving accurate modeling of the time and frequency transfers.