Surface concentration of transmission eigenfunctions (Q6156425)

The authors of this article consider an eigenvalue problem coming from acoustic scattering theory. Specifically, they deal with the interior transmission eigenvalue problem which is a system of two coupled partial differential equations along with transmission boundary conditions. This leads to a non-elliptic and non-selfadjoint spectral problem. The eigensolutions to this problem are closely related to non-scattering waves and hence to invisibility. Another aspect is that reconstruction algorithms like Kirsch's factorization method or the (generalized) sampling method are not justified for such wave numbers that are the corresponding eigenvalues, the so called interior transmission eigenvalues. In a previous paper, some of the authors numerically observed that the eigenfunctions concentrate on the boundary of the given domain and close to it. This is fundamentally different to classical eigenvalue problems, for example the eigenfunctions of the negative Laplacian with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary condition. In this article, the authors theoretically verify in detail this interesting behavior for the transmission eigenfunctions by reformulating the interior transmission problem using boundary integral operators combined with the generalized Weyl's law and certain novel ergodic properties concentrating specifically on the three dimensional case.