Generalized Eigenfunctions for Waves in Inhomogeneous Media

✍ Scribed by Abel Klein; Andrew Koines; Maximilian Seifert

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 268 KB
• Volume: 190
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-1236
• DOI: 10.1006/jfan.2001.3887

✦ Synopsis

Many wave propagation phenomena in classical physics are governed by equations that can be recast in Schrödinger form. In this approach the classical wave equation (e.g., Maxwell's equations, acoustic equation, elastic equation) is rewritten in Schrödinger form, leading to the study of the spectral theory of its classical wave operator, a self-adjoint, partial differential operator on a Hilbert space of vectorvalued, square integrable functions. Physically interesting inhomogeneous media give rise to nonsmooth coefficients. We construct a generalized eigenfunction expansion for classical wave operators with nonsmooth coefficients. Our construction yields polynomially bounded generalized eigenfunctions, the set of generalized eigenvalues forming a subset of the operator's spectrum with full spectral measure.