Spectral properties of periodic media in the large coupling limit (Q4494634)

Let \(\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^m\), \(m\geq 2\), be an open connected set which is periodic with respect to the lattice \(\mathbb{Z}^m\) and \(M=\mathbb{R}^m \setminus \Omega\) does not intersect the boundary of the fundamental period cell \(Q_0=(0, 1]^m\). The authors study the band-gab structure and the integrated density of states for a class of periodic divergence type operators of the form \(T_\lambda =-\nabla( {\mathbf a}+\lambda {\mathbf b})\nabla\), \(\lambda\geq 1\), on \(L_2 (\mathbb{R}^m)\), where \({\mathbf a},{\mathbf b}\) are suitable coefficient matrices. The principal result of the paper, under some smoothness assumptions on coefficients and \(M\) is the following: There is always at least one gap opening up in the spectrum of \(T_\lambda\) as \(\lambda\to\infty\) (except for trivial cases). Furthermore, a connection between the band-gap structure of \(T_\lambda\) and the Dirichlet eigenvalue problem on \(M_0=M\cap Q_0\) is established. The authors then obtain several known results as corollaries. The method used is based on so-called Hilbert space -- methods and the basic aim here is to obtain a selfadjoint realization of \(T_\lambda\) via quadratic forms.