Determination of electromagnetic Bloch variety in a medium with frequency-dependent coefficients (Q2000634)

The authors compute the Bloch variety for the Maxwell system with frequency dependent material parameters. The authors first propose a variational formulation of the quadratic eigenvalue problem, and show that the linearized problem results in an eigenvalue for a compact operator. A few numerical results are then provided for the linearized problem. Importantly, it is shown that the authors' new method agrees with finite element calculation of the Block variety in the frequency independent case. The convergence rate of the method is explored numerically, but has not yet been proven.