QED commutation relations for inhomogeneous Kramers-Kronig dielectrics

Recently a quantization scheme for the phenomenological Maxwell theory of the full electromagnetic field in an inhomogeneous three-dimensional, dispersive, and absorbing dielectric medium has been developed and applied to a system consisting of two infinite half-spaces with a common planar interface (H.T. Dung, L. Knoll, and D.-G. Welsch, Phys. Rev. A 57, 3931 (1998)). Here we show that the scheme, which is based on the classical Green-tenser integral representation of the electromagnetic field, applies to any inhomogeneous medium. For this purpose we prove that the fundamental equal-time commutation relations of QED an preserved for an arbitrarily space-dependent, Kramers-Kronig consistent permittivity. Further, an extension of the quantization scheme to linear media with bounded regions of amplification is given, and the problem of anisotropic media is briefly addressed.