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Back to Departmental Colloquium: Fall 2000

Departmental Colloquium


Date: Tuesday, Nov 14, 2000

Time: 4:15PM

Location: JWB 335


David Dobson

Texas A&M

Title

Maximizing band gaps in periodic dielectric structures

Abstract

Crystalline microstructures made from high-contrast dielectric materials have the interesting property that for certain material arrangements, the frequency spectrum for electromagnetic wave propagation admits a complete band gap. Such structures are relatively new and are expected to have a large impact in optoelectronics. We consider the problem of determining material arrangements which result in maximal band gaps. This can be formulated as an extremization problem, which turns out to have a nonsmooth but Lipschitz continuous objective. Well-posedness of the problem is studied, and a generalized gradient ascent maximization algorithm is proposed. Computational experiments are presented in which several novel structures with large band gaps are obtained.

Mathematical Biology Computational Mathematics Applied Mathematics

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