Existence of guided waves due to a lineic perturbation of a 3D periodic medium
This provides a theoretical existence proof for guided waves in a 3D periodic structure, which is of interest for waveguiding applications in photonics or acoustics.
The paper proves that a lineic perturbation of a 3D periodic medium (a grating of thin pipes) can create guided waves propagating along the perturbed line, for sufficiently small pipe diameter and a specific shrinkage factor.
In this note, we exhibit a three dimensional structure that permits to guide waves. This structure is obtained by a geometrical perturbation of a 3D periodic domain that consists of a three dimensional grating of equi-spaced thin pipes oriented along three orthogonal directions. Homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions are imposed on the boundary of the domain. The diameter of the section of the pipes, of order $ε$ \textgreater{} 0, is supposed to be small. We prove that, for $ε$ small enough, shrinking the section of one line of the grating by a factor of $\sqrt$ $μ$ (0 \textless{} $μ$ \textless{} 1) creates guided modes that propagate along the perturbed line. Our result relies on the asymptotic analysis (with respect to $ε$) of the spectrum of the Laplace-Neumann operator in this structure. Indeed, as $ε$ tends to 0, the domain tends to a periodic graph, and the spectrum of the associated limit operator can be computed explicitly.