Homogenization of the spectral problem for periodic elliptic operators with sign-changing density function (Q717483)

The authors (extensively inspired by thorough formal asymptotics) study the asymptotic behavior of a Dirichlet problem for a linear elliptic equation posed in a rectangular bounded domain. The non-standard feature of their problem is that the right-hand side of the PDE changes sign. They show that the spectrum is discrete and consists of two series, one of them tending to \(+\infty\), while the other one to \(-\infty\). The asymptotic behavior of positive and negative eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenfunctions seems to depend on whether the average of the weight function is positive, negative or zero.