Riesz bases and Jordan form of the translation operator in semi-infinite periodic waveguides (Q385983)

The paper under review is concerned with the study of the propagation of time-harmonic acoustic or transverse magnetic polarized electromagnetic waves in a periodic waveguide lying in the lalf-strip \((0,\infty)\times (0,L)\). The main results establishes that there exists a Riesz basis of the space of solutions to the time-harmonic wave equation such that the translation operator shifting a function by one periodicity length to the left is represented by an infinite Jordan matrix which contains at most a finite number of Jordan blocks of size bigger than 1. Both the cases of frequencies in a band gap and frequencies in the spectrum and a variety of boundary conditions on the top and bottom are considered. A generalization of Rouché's theorem is a basic tool in the qualitative analysis developed in this paper. This paper also contains two appendices on radiation conditions and on uniqueness results.