Spectral analysis and domain truncation for Maxwell's equations (Q2111986)

The authors investigate how the spectrum of the anisotropic Maxwell system with bounded conductivity on a Lipschitz domain is approximated by domain truncation. The authors introduce the concept of limiting essential spectrum to sequences of pencils of closed operators in order to better understand spectral pollution for the Maxwell system. The main result establishes a small enclosure for the set of spectral pollution of the domain truncation method for the anisotropic Maxwell system, which is much smaller than the one given by the essential numerical range. This result relies on new non-convex enclosures for the spectra of Maxwell problems. The authors also show that for asymptotically constant coefficients, spectral pollution may occur only in the essential numerical range of the the quadratic pencil. A number of examples are given, such as a semi-infinite cylinder with piecewise constant coefficients, and show the sharpness of the authors' result.