Spectral analysis of metamaterials in curved manifolds

Abstract Negative-index metamaterials possess a negative refractive index and thus present an interesting substance for designing uncommon optical effects such as invisibility cloaking. This paper deals with operators encountered in an operator-theoretic description of metamaterials. First, we introduce an indefinite Laplacian and consider it on a compact tubular neighbourhood in constantly curved compact two-dimensional Riemannian ambient manifolds, with Euclidean rectangle in <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi mathvariant="double-struck">R</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> being present as a special case. As this operator is not semi-bounded, standard form-theoretic methods cannot be applied. We show that this operator is (essentially) self-adjoint via separation of variables and find its spectral characteristics. We also provide a new method for obtaining alternative definition of the self-adjoint operator in non-critical case via a generalized form representation theorem. The main motivation is existence of essential spectrum in bounded domains.